ar
divergence of opinion. So far from exercising a healing influence,
the decision widened immensely the already serious breach between
the North and the South. The persons immediately involved in the
litigation were quickly lost sight of;[1] but the constitutional
principle affirmed by the court was defended by the South and
denounced by the North with zeal and acrimony. The Republican party
did not further question or propose to disturb the final judgment in
the case; but it declared that the Dred Scott doctrines of the Supreme
Court should not be made a rule of political action, and precisely
this the South, together with the bulk of the Northern Democrats,
insisted should be done.

[Sidenote] 19 Howard, pp. 460-1.

A single phase of the controversy will serve to illustrate the general
drift of the discussion throughout the Union. Some three months after
the delivery of the opinion of the court, Senator Douglas found
himself again among his constituents in Illinois, and although there
was no political campaign in progress, current events and the roused
state of public feeling seemed to require that he should define his
views in a public speech. It marks his acuteness as a politician that
he already realized what a fatal stab the Dred Scott decision had
given his vaunted principle of "Popular Sovereignty," with which he
justified his famous repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He had ever
since argued that Congressional prohibition of slavery was obsolete
and useless, and that the choice of slavery or freedom ought to be
confided to the local Territorial laws, just as it was confided to
local State constitutions. But the Dred Scott decision announced that
slaves were property which Congress could not exclude from the
Territories, adding also the inevitable conclusion that what Congress
could not do a Territorial Legislature could not.

Difficult as this made his task of reconciling his favorite theory
with the Dred Scott decision, such was his political boldness, and
such had been his skill and success in sophistry, that he undertook
even this hopeless effort. Douglas, therefore, made a speech at
Springfield, Illinois, on the 12th of June, 1857, in which he broadly
and fully indorsed and commended the opinion of Chief-Justice Taney
and his concurring associates, declaring that "Their judicial
decisions will stand in all future time, a proud monument to their
greatness, the admiration of the good and wise, and a re