He expected that it
would be capital for small politicians in the country, and that they
would make an effort to deceive the people with it; and he was not
mistaken, for Lincoln is carrying out the plan admirably. * * *
The third question which Mr. Lincoln presented is--If the Supreme Court
of the United States shall decide that a State of this Union cannot
exclude slavery from its own limits, will I submit to it? I am amazed
that Mr. Lincoln should ask such a question. Mr. Lincoln's object is to
cast an imputation upon the Supreme Court. He knows that there never was
but one man in America, claiming any degree of intelligence or decency,
who ever for a moment pretended such a thing. It is true that the
_Washington Union_, in an article published on the 17th of last
December, did put forth that doctrine, and I denounced the article on
the floor of the Senate. * * * Lincoln's friends, Trumbull, and Seward,
and Hale, and Wilson, and the whole Black Republican side of the Senate
were silent. They left it to me to denounce it. And what was the
reply made to me on that occasion? Mr. Toombs, of Georgia, got up and
undertook to lecture me on the ground that I ought not to have deemed
the article worthy of notice, and ought not to have replied to it; that
there was not one man, woman, or child south of the Potomac, in any
slave State, who did not repudiate any such pretension.
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