found in the utterance of Attorney-General
Caleb Cushing, of the retiring Pierce Administration, in a little
parting address to the Supreme Court, March 4, 1857:

"Yours is not the gauntleted hand of the soldier, nor yours the
voice which commands armies, rules cabinets, or leads senates; but
though you are none of these, yet you are backed by all of them.
Theirs is the external power which sustains your moral authority;
you are the incarnate mind of the political body of the nation. In
the complex institutions of our country you are the pivot point
upon which the rights and liberties of all, government and people
alike, turn; or, rather, you are the central light of constitutional
wisdom around which they perpetually revolve. Long may this court
retain the confidence of our country as the great conservators,
not of the private peace only, but of the sanctity and integrity
of the Constitution."--"National Intelligencer," March 5, 1857.

[5] "Mr. Buchanan was also preparing his inaugural address with his
usual care and painstaking, and I copied his drafts and recopied them
until he had prepared it to his satisfaction. It underwent no alteration
after he went to the National Hotel in Washington, except that he there
inserted a clause in regard to the question then pending in the Supreme
Court, as one that would dispose of a vexed and dangerous topic by the
highest judicial authority of the land."--Statement of James Buchanan
Henry (President Buchanan's private secretary) in the "Life of James
Buchanan," by George Ticknor Curtis, Vol. II., p. 187.

[6] "It may not be improper for me here to add that so great an
interest did I take in that decision, and in its principles being
sustained and understood in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, that I took
the trouble at my own cost to print or have printed a large edition of
that decision to scatter it over the State; and unless the mails have
miscarried, there is scarcely a member elected to the Legislature who
has not received a copy with my frank."--Vice-president Breckinridge,
Frankfort Speech, December, 1859.

CHAPTER V

DOUGLAS AND LINCOLN ON DRED SCOTT

Manifestly, when the educated intellects of the learned judges
differed so radically concerning the principles of law and the facts
of history applicable to the Dred Scott question, the public at large
could hardly be expected to receive the new dogmas without simil