What in the Constitution forbade slaves from being taken into the territories?  Not a thing.  Moreover the territories were the commons of all the states, won by their common valor and blood.  Could not a liquor dealer from Chicago take his stock to Kansas?  Assuredly.  Why then could not a planter from Louisiana take his slaves to Nebraska?  Liquor and slaves were property.  Who said so?  The fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution, and the fugitive-slave law of 1850 which Lincoln admitted he would not alter.

But after the liquor was in Kansas or the slave in Nebraska could they flourish?  That depended on the territorial law, the attitude of the people.  Did Congress have to pass favorable legislation?  From what clause flowed the duty and the power?  Did a territorial legislature have power to pass favorable legislation?  It was not called upon to do so by anything in the Federal Constitution.  Therefore, the mere right to take a slave into free territory under the Dred Scott decision, take it as property, was a naked right without local support.  “This popular sovereignty is as thin as soup made from the shadow of a starved pigeon,” said Lincoln.  Nevertheless, it was what it was and no more.  And Lincoln’s catch question on the legal right to keep slavery out of the territories did not catch Douglas.  The mere right to take a slave into free territory could coexist with no protective legislation after the slave was there.  It could coexist with unfavorable legislation and social opposition.  Let natural processes rule.

What was the difference between this and girding the slave states around with freedom?  That could scarcely be done without the aid of natural processes.

But since Douglas did not admit that Congress had to give favorable legislation to a slave owner who had taken his slave into a territory, the South was drawing away from him.  He was not their friend to the extreme doctrine of taking a slave into a territory and keeping him a slave against the will of the territory.  Was Douglas unmoral?  What of the unmorality of taking Kansas and Nebraska from the Indians?  Was he syllogistic, analytic, intellectually hard?  But was not Lincoln so too?  Douglas derived from Jefferson through Jackson; Lincoln from Hamilton through Webster, whatever else could be said of them.

Thus I read on through the night until I had finished all that Douglas and Lincoln had said at the six debates then finished.  The next morning Reverdy and I started for Alton.

I could scarcely wait to get my first glimpse of Lincoln.

CHAPTER LVII

Alton, this old town that I had visited so many times before, was crowded with people drawn from the surrounding country, from across the river in Missouri.  As to the temper of the audience, it rather favored Douglas.  I saw the leering, ugly faces that I had seen in the lobbies of the hotels in St. Louis years before at the railroad convention, when Captain Grant was lounging there and planters swarmed at the bar and cursed Yankees and nigger-lovers.