The Concert on “Dred Scott.”
The Supreme Court of the United States decided in a fugitive-slave case, one Dred Scott, that no negro slave could be any State citizen; that neither Congress nor a territorial organization can exclude slavery; that the United States courts would not decide whether a slave in a free State becomes free, but left that to the slave-holding State courts. Lincoln, in debate with Senator Douglas, asserted that the latter, Chief Justice Taney, and others, were in a league to perpetuate slavery and extend it.
“We cannot absolutely know, but when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen—as Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James (Douglas, President Pierce, Taney, Buchanan), and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or mill... in such a case 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 or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck.” —(The “Divided House” Speech, June 17, 1858, Springfield, Illinois.)