ska Bill and the
repeal of the Missouri Compromise, it has been but a little while since
he was the valiant advocate of the Missouri Compromise. I want to know
if Buchanan has not as much right to be inconsistent as Douglas has? Has
Douglas the exclusive right, in this country, of being on all sides of
all questions? Is nobody allowed that high privilege but himself? Is he to
have an entire monopoly on that subject?

So far as Judge Douglas addressed his speech to me, or so far as it was
about me, it is my business to pay some attention to it. I have heard the
Judge state two or three times what he has stated to-day, that in a speech
which I made at Springfield, Illinois, I had in a very especial manner
complained that the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case had decided that
a negro could never be a citizen of the United States. I have omitted by
some accident heretofore to analyze this statement, and it is required
of me to notice it now. In point of fact it is untrue. I never have
complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it held that a
negro could not be a citizen, and the Judge is always wrong when he says
I ever did so complain of it. I have the speech here, and I will thank
him or any of his friends to show where I said that a negro should be a
citizen, and complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because
it declared he could not be one. I have done no such thing; and Judge
Douglas, so persistently insisting that I have done so, has strongly
impressed me with the belief of a predetermination on his part to
misrepresent me. He could not get his foundation for insisting that I
was in favor of this negro equality anywhere else as well as he could by
assuming that untrue proposition. Let me tell this audience what is true
in regard to that matter; and the means by which they may correct me if I
do not tell them truly is by a recurrence to the speech itself. I spoke
of the Dred Scott decision in my Springfield speech, and I was then
endeavoring to prove that the Dred Scott decision was a portion of a
system or scheme to make slavery national in this country. I pointed out
what things had been decided by the court. I mentioned as a fact that they
had decided that a negro could not be a citizen; that they had done so, as
I supposed, to deprive the negro, under all circumstances, of the remotest
possibility of ever becoming a citizen and claiming the rights of a
citizen of the United States under a