V THE CITIZEN AS A LAW-MAKER If the United States has ever possessed a great citizen, it was Abraham Lincoln; and if ever a citizen felt the restraints of the Federal Constitution, it was he. Believing slavery to be a heinous crime, he perceived its supporters taking refuge behind the provisions of the Constitution, not only for the maintenance of that institution in the States where it had originally existed, but for its extension into the free territories of the West. The Dred Scott decision, by which in 1857 the Supreme Court of the United States appeared to have established forever the right of a slaveholder to reclaim possession of a liberated slave wherever the laws of the United States extended, was based upon the following interpretation of the Constitution: If the Constitution recognizes the right of property of the master in a slave, and makes no distinction between that description of property and any other property owned by a citizen, no tribunal, acting under the authority of the United States, whether it be legislative, executive, or judicial, has a right to draw such a distinction, or deny to it the benefit of the provisions and guarantees which have been provided for the protection of private property against the encroachments of the government. Since the existence of slavery as a fact was recognized in the Constitution, the Court drew the inference that the act of Congress known as the “Missouri Compromise” was not constitutional, and was, therefore, null and void; and that the former slave, Dred Scott, was not made free by his presence in territory where Congress had prohibited slavery, and would not be even though taken there by his owner with the intention of permanent residence. This denial of the right of Congress to exempt any portion of the territories of the United States where slavery did not exist from the recognition of property in human life, was to Lincoln intolerable. Against it his reason and his conscience were in revolt. So strongly was he moved by what he esteemed a monstrous injustice, that he might easily have felt constrained to condemn the Constitution as responsible for the wrong; but this seems never to have occurred to him. The decision itself he denounced on what he believed to be legal as well as moral grounds, but he proposed no amendment of the Constitution. With calm and unshaken faith in the essential soundness of the fundamental law, he awaited the day when the right would triumph, not through a modification of the Constitution --which was not responsible for the existence of slavery-or by disputing the independence of the judiciary—which is the keystone of the entire constitutional system - but by the force of public opinion upon a great moral question which would, he believed, in the end result in a reversal of the decision so far as the extension of slavery into free territory was concerned. With the clearness of vision and the patience of a great statesman, he saw that the fault was not in the Constitution, and not in the freedom of the judiciary, but in treating a human being as property in territories where slavery as an institution had been prohibited by law. In his debate with Stephen A. Douglas, he declared: “We oppose the Dred Scott decision in a certain way. ... .. We do not propose that when Dred Scott has been decided to be a slave by the court, we |