never have complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it
held that a negro could not be a citizen, and the Judge is always wrong
when he says I ever did so complain of it. I have the speech here, and I
will thank him or any of his friends to show where I said that a negro
should be a citizen, and complained especially of the Dred Scott decision
because it declared he could not be one. I have done no such thing; and
Judge Douglas, so persistently insisting that I have done so, has
strongly impressed me with the belief of a predetermination on his part
to misrepresent me. He could not get his foundation for insisting that I
was in favor of this negro equality anywhere else as well as he could by
assuming that untrue proposition. Let me tell this audience what is true
in regard to that matter; and the means by which they may correct me if I
do not tell them truly is by a recurrence to the speech itself. I spoke
of the Dred Scott decision in my Springfield speech, and I was then
endeavoring to prove that the Dred Scott decision was a portion of a
system or scheme to make slavery national in this country. I pointed out
what things had been decided by the court. I mentioned as a fact that
they had decided that a negro could not be a citizen; that they had done
so, as I supposed, to deprive the negro, under all circumstances, of the
remotest possibility of ever becoming a citizen and claiming the rights
of a citizen of the United States under a certain clause of the
Constitution. I stated that, without making any complaint of it at all. I
then went on and stated the other points decided in the case; namely,
that the bringing of a negro into the State of Illinois and holding him
in slavery for two years here was a matter in regard to which they would
not decide whether it would make him free or not; that they decided the
further point that taking him into a United States Territory where
slavery was prohibited by Act of Congress did not make him free, because
that Act of Congress, as they held, was unconstitutional. I mentioned
these three things as making up the points decided in that case. I