But I cannot shake Judge Douglas’s teeth loose from the Dred Scott decision.  Like some obstinate animal (I mean no disrespect) that will hang on when he has once got his teeth fixed—­you may cut off a leg, or you may tear away an arm, still he will not relax his hold.  And so I may point out to the Judge, and say that he is bespattered all over, from the beginning of his political life to the present time, with attacks upon judicial decisions,—­I may cut off limb after limb of his public record, and strive to wrench from him a single dictum of the Court, yet I cannot divert him from it.  He hangs to the last to the Dred Scott decision....  Henry Clay, my beau ideal of a statesman, ... once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our independence, and muzzle the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return; that they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate there the love of liberty; and then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country!  To my thinking, Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast influence, doing that very thing in this community when he says that the negro has nothing in the Declaration of Independence.  Henry Clay plainly understood the contrary.  Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our Revolution, and, to the extent of his ability, muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return.  When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us.  When he says he “cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up,”—­that it is a sacred right of self-government,—­he is, in my judgment, penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people.  And now I will only say, that when, by all these means and appliances, Judge Douglas shall succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance with his own views; when these vast assemblages shall echo back all these sentiments; when they shall come to repeat his views and avow his principles, and to say all that he says on these mighty questions,—­then it needs only the formality of a second Dred Scott decision, which he indorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

Lincoln’s Reply to Judge Douglas in the Second Joint Debate.  Freeport, Illinois.  August 27, 1858

...  The plain truth is this.  At the introduction of the Nebraska policy, we believed there was a new era being introduced in the history of the Republic, which tended to the spread and perpetuation of slavery.  But in our opposition to that measure we did not agree with one another in everything.  The people in the north end of the State were for stronger measures of opposition than we of the southern and central portions