ved that free society is not and shall not be a failure, and who
can conscientiously declare that in the last contest he had done what
he thought best--let every such one have charity to believe that every
other one can say as much. Thus let bygones be bygones; let past
differences as nothing be; and with steady eye on the real issue let
us reinaugurate the good old 'central idea' of the republic. We can do
it. The human heart is with us; God is with us. We shall again be
able, not to declare that 'all States as States are equal,' nor yet
that 'all citizens as citizens are equal,' but to renew the broader,
better declaration, including both these and much more, that 'all men
are created equal.'"

The spring of 1857 gave Lincoln a new line of argument. Buchanan was
scarcely in the Presidential chair before the Supreme Court, in the
decision of the Dred Scott case, declared that a negro could not sue
in the United States courts and that Congress could not prohibit
slavery in the Territories. This decision was such an evident advance
of the slave power that there was a violent uproar in the North.
Douglas went at once to Illinois to calm his constituents. "What," he
cried, "oppose the Supreme Court! is it not sacred? To resist it is
anarchy."

Lincoln met him fairly on the issue in a speech at Springfield in
June, 1857.

"We believe as much as Judge Douglas (perhaps more) in obedience to
and respect for the judicial department of government.... But we
think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that
made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we
can to have it overrule this. We offer no resistance to it.... If this
important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the
judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with
legal public expectation and with the steady practice of the
departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on
assumed historical facts which are not really true; or if, wanting in
some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had
there been affirmed and reaffirmed through a course of years, it then
might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to
acquiesce in it as a precedent. But when, as is true, we find it
wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not
resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat
it as not having yet quite es