THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
about twenty months later, and then on an occasion even more memorable. The result of the election in Illinois was unfavorable to Mr. Lincoln as a candidate for the Senate. Douglas did not, indeed, receive a majority of the popular vote, but owing to the apportionment of legislative districts, he won a majority in the new legislature. His return to the Senate was thus assured. But Lincoln was the real conqueror in another sense. His keen political foresight and his courageous leadership had secured to the anti-slavery cause an advantage which rendered its triumph in the next presidential election well-nigh certain. In the famous Freeport debate he had forced Douglas to make, in the most authoritative form and on so conspicuous an occasion that all the people could hear every word uttered, a declaration which rendered the disruption of his party inevitable. It was the declaration that, while the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision had asserted the Constitutional right of the slave-holder to hold his slaves as property in any Territory of the United States, yet the people of a Territory had the legal power, practically, to nullify that right by denying to slavery the necessary police protection—in other words, practically to exclude slavery by “unfriendly legislation.” This was a jugglery which the slavery propagandists who formed the aggressive force of the Democratic party in the South would not only not accept, but would never forgive. With inexorable logic they argued that, if the Constitution gave the slave-holder the right to hold his slaves as property in the Territories of the United States, the Territorial legislatures were in duty bound not only to abstain from whatever might tend practically to defeat that right, but to make such laws as were required to protest him in the full enjoyment of it. Whoever refused to subscribe to that doctrine, was, in their eyes, an enemy of the South. And as to making such a
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