Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/148

 in its logic, its course of reasoning, its philosophical deductions, even in its views of historic events, by moral sentiments, by sympathetic emotions, and by party spirit. Indeed, it certainly was not party spirit that determined my course, for my deeply grounded distrust of party tyranny over the human conscience put me on my guard against any undue influence from that quarter. But this campaign for an election to a judicial office was an anti-slavery campaign—a campaign against one of those arrogations of power on the part of the “slaveocracy” which offended our moral sense, insulted the dignity of manhood, and struck at the fundamental principles of democratic government, by denying to the alleged fugitive slave a fair trial by jury. The Supreme Court of the United States had done the thing most dangerous to its authority that a judicial tribunal can do—it had, in the Dred Scott decision, gone out of its way to take part in the political discussion of the day—and that in favor of slavery. And now the same Federal Supreme Court sternly overruled the action of the State Judiciary, which had been in favor of freedom and human rights.

All these things co-operated in bringing about a contest in which the Republican party, the natural opponent of the States' rights doctrine against a law maintained by the pro-slavery men as a bulwark of the “peculiar institution,” planted itself upon extreme States' rights ground and went to the very verge of actual nullification, while the Democratic party, the traditional champion of the States' rights doctrine, became an ardent defender of the Federal power as against any pretensions of States' rights that asserted themselves according to the principles promulgated in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. It was one of those struggles which, as Mr. Lincoln once said, become so mixed that, in the heat of the wrestle, the