now pending." How Mr. Buchanan could know, or how he was
entitled to know, that a question not directly or necessarily
involved in a case pending before the Supreme Court "would be
speedily and finally settled" became a subject of popular inquiry.
Anti-slavery speakers and anti-slavery papers indulged in severe
criticism both of Mr. Buchanan and the Court, declaring that the
independence of the co-ordinate branches of the government was
dangerously invaded when the Executive was privately advised of a
judicial decision in advance of its delivery by the Court. William
Pitt Fessenden, who always spoke with precision and never with
passion, asserted in the Senate that the Court, after hearing the
argument, had reserved its judgment until the Presidential election
was decided. He avowed his belief that Mr. Buchanan would have
been defeated if the decision had not been withheld, and that in
the event of Fremont's election "we should never have heard of a
doctrine so utterly at variance with all truth, so utterly destitute
of all legal logic, so founded on error, and so unsupported by any
thing resembling argument."

Mr. Lincoln, whose singular powers were beginning to be appreciated,
severely attacked the decision in a public speech in Illinois, not
merely for its doctrine, but for the mode in which the decision
had been brought about, and the obvious political intent of the
judges. He showed how the Kansas-Nebraska Act left the people of
the Territories perfectly free to settle the slavery question for
themselves, "subject only to the Constitution of the United States!"
That qualification he said was "the exactly fitted niche for the
Dred Scott decision to come in and declare the perfect freedom to
be no freedom at all." He then gave a humorous illustration by
asking in homely but telling phrase, "if we saw a lot of framed
timbers gotten out at different times and places by different
workmen,--Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James,--and if we saw
these timbers joined together and exactly make the frame of a house,
with tenons and mortises all fitting, what is the conclusion? We
find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and
Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and
all worked upon a common plan before the first blow was struck."
This quaint mode of arraigning the two President, the Chief Justice
and Senator Douglas, was extraordinarily effective with the masses.
In a sin