To this Judge Douglas replied:
It would be perfectly legitimate and proper for Mr, Lincoln, myself, or any other lawyer, to go before the Supreme Court and argue any question that might arise there, taking either side of it, and enforcing it with all our ability, zeal and energy, but when the decision is pronounced, that decision becomes the law of the land, and he, and you, and myself, and every other good citizen, must bow to it, and yield obedience to it. Unless we respect and bow in deference to the final decisions of the highest judicial tribunal in our country, we are driven at once to anarchy, to violence, to mob law, and there is no security left for our property, or our own civil rights. What protects your property but the law, and who expounds the law but the judicial tribunals; and if an appeal is to be taken from the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, in all cases where a person does not like the adjudication, to whom is that appeal to be taken! Are we to appeal from the Supreme Court to a county meeting like this?[2]
Douglas also denied the conspiracy charge. Not content with Douglas' denial, Lincoln renewed the charge, and while admitting that he did not "know" submitted the evidence upon which he "believed" it to be true.[3] Likewise, he objected to "the sacredness that Judge Douglas throws around this decision,"[4] and said:
If I were in Congress, and a vote should come up on a question whether slavery should be prohibited in a new territory, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, I would vote that it should.[5]
He also asked Douglas whether he would acquiesce in a second Dred Scott decision forbidding the free states from excluding slavery from their limits,[6] and stated that Douglas himself had approved of Jackson's refusal to be bound by a Supreme Court decision touching the constitutionality of the United States Bank. He went even farther and asserted that Douglas was once in favor of "adding five new Judges" to the Supreme Court of Illinois in order to reverse a decision of that court, and that "it ended in the judge's sitting down on that very bench as one of the five new judges to break down the four old ones."[7] In short, "Judge Douglas is for Supreme Court decisions when he likes and against them when he does not like them."[8]
