It was a desperate expedient to shield himself as well as he might from the damaging recoil of his own temporizing statesmanship.

The declaration made thus early is worthy of historical notice as being the substance and groundwork of the speaker's famous "Freeport doctrine," or theory of "unfriendly legislation," to which Lincoln's searching interrogatories drove him in the great Lincoln-Douglas debates of the following year.
Repeated and amplified at that time, it became in the eyes of the South the unpardonable political heresy which lost him the Presidential nomination and caused the rupture of the Democratic National Convention at Charleston in the summer of 1860.

For the moment, however, the sophism doubtless satisfied his many warm partisans.

He did not dwell on the dangerous point, but trusted for oratorical effect rather to his renewed appeals to the popular prejudice against the blacks, so strong in central Illinois, indorsing and emphasizing Chief-Justice Taney's assertion that negroes were not included in the words of the Declaration of Independence, and arguing that if the principle of equality were admitted and carried out to its logical results, it would necessarily lead not only to the abolition of slavery in the slave-States, but to the general amalgamation of the two races.
The Republican party of Illinois had been greatly encouraged and strengthened by its success in electing the State officers in the previous autumn; and as their recognized leader and champion, Lincoln made a reply to this speech some two weeks later, June 26, 1857, also at Springfield.

Though embracing other topics, the question of the hour, the Dred Scott decision, was nevertheless its chief subject.