They have him in his prison house, they have searched his person and left no prying instrument with him.

One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can he produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is....
There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races; and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope upon the chances of his being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself.

If he can by much drumming and repeating fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm.

He therefore clings to this hope as a drowning man to the last plank.

He makes an occasion for lugging it in, from the opposition to the Dred Scott decision.