freedom!’ is that turning our backs upon him?  Here, for example, is a man engaged in highway robbery, and another man is acting as an accessory, without whose aid the robber cannot succeed.  In saying to the accomplice.  ‘Hands off!  Don’t aid the villain!’ shall I be told that this is enabling the highwayman to rob with impunity?  What an absurdity!  Are we not trying to save the pockets of all travelers from being picked in seeking to break up all connection with highway robbery?”

The convention projected a general convention of the free States to consider the subject, and “Resolved, That the sooner the separation takes place, the more peaceful it will be; but that peace or war is a secondary consideration in view of our present perils.  Slavery must be conquered, peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.”  The projected general convention, owing to the monetary crisis of 1857, did not take place; but the extraordinary public excitement on the slavery question increased rather than diminished during the year.  The increasing menace to the domination of the slave-power from this source had become so great that it was deemed prudent on the part of the upholders of that power to allay it by means of an authoritative utterance upon the vexed question of slavery in the national Territories from the highest judicial tribunal in the Land.  The Northern respect for the opinion of the Supreme Court, the South and her allies in the free States counted upon as the vehicle of the quieting medicament.  For, if the Missouri Compromise were pronounced by that Court unconstitutional and, therefore, ab initio, null and void, no wrong was done the North through its formal repeal by Congress.  The act of abrogation, in this view, added nothing to the South which did not belong to it as well before as after its passage, detracted nothing from the North which was justly its due in the premises.  In pursuance of this cunningly devised scheme the Supreme Court delivered itself of an opinion in the famous “Dred Scott Case.”  So abhorrent it was to the intelligence and moral sense of the free States, that it produced results altogether opposed to those designed by the men who invoked it.  Instead of checking, the execrated judgment augmented enormously the existing excitement.  Garrison’s bitter taunt that “the Union is but another name for the iron reign of the slave-power,” was driven home to the North, by the Dred Scott decision, with the logic of another unanswerable fact.  Confidence in the independence and impartiality of the Supreme Court was seriously shaken, and widespread suspicion struck root at the North touching the subserviency of that tribunal to the interests and designs of the slave-power.