William Pitt Fessenden, who always spoke with precision and never with passion, asserted in the Senate that the Court, after hearing the argument, had reserved its judgment until the Presidential election was decided.

He avowed his belief that Mr.Buchanan would have been defeated if the decision had not been withheld, and that in the event of Fremont's election "we should never have heard of a doctrine so utterly at variance with all truth, so utterly destitute of all legal logic, so founded on error, and so unsupported by any thing resembling argument." Mr.Lincoln, whose singular powers were beginning to be appreciated, severely attacked the decision in a public speech in Illinois, not merely for its doctrine, but for the mode in which the decision had been brought about, and the obvious political intent of the judges.

He showed how the Kansas-Nebraska Act left the people of the Territories perfectly free to settle the slavery question for themselves, "subject only to the Constitution of the United States!" That qualification he said was "the exactly fitted niche for the Dred Scott decision to come in and declare the perfect freedom to be no freedom at all." He then gave a humorous illustration by asking in homely but telling phrase, "if we saw a lot of framed timbers gotten out at different times and places by different workmen,--Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James,--and if we saw these timbers joined together and exactly make the frame of a house, with tenons and mortises all fitting, what is the conclusion?
We find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan before the first blow was struck." This quaint mode of arraigning the two President, the Chief Justice and Senator Douglas, was extraordinarily effective with the masses.
In a single paragraph, humorously expressed, he had framed an indictment against four men upon which he lived to secure a conviction before the jury of the American people.
The decision was rendered especially odious throughout the North by the use of certain unfortunate expressions which in the heat of the hour were somewhat distorted by the anti-slavery press, and made to appear unwarrantably offensive.

But there was no misrepresentation and no misunderstanding of the essential position of the Court on the political question.

It was unmistakably held that ownership in slaves was as much entitled to protection under the Constitution in the Territories of the United States as any other species of property, and that Congress possessed no power over the subject except the power to legislate in aid of slavery.
The decision was at war with the practice and traditions of the government from its foundation, and set aside the matured convictions of two generations of conservative statesmen from the South as well as from the North.