He lies cold in death, but he could have no better epitaph than this: “Here rests one who would not compromise with Wrong.” When Senators and Presidents bent to the ignoble behest, he stood firm.

He was gifted to see that Slavery, unlike Tariff or Bank, did not come within the range of compromise any more than the Decalogue or Multiplication Table.

He saw well how shamefully unconstitutional and inhuman was the Fugitive Slave Act, in spite of every apology of compromise, and refused it all support.

He lies cold in death, but his principles will live to sweep this unutterable atrocity from the statute-book, which it still fills from cover to cover with blackness.

He was not only a faithful counsellor of perfect loyalty, in whom truth was a religion and an instinct, but he was a counsellor whose experience of mankind and of public life united with aptitude for affairs in giving to what he said added…

He had been a lifelong soldier of Liberty, baptized into a service of blood.

But on this account he was only the more inexorable toward a wrong so cruel in all its influences.

A child of the New Testament, he was no stranger to the early Hebrew spirit, and had little patience with those who, born among Northern schools and churches, strove to arrest or mitigate the doom of Slavery.

He was a positive man, of positive principles, who knew well how much was always lost by timid counsels, especially on great occasions.

Of all doubts, there are none more painful or indefensible than those by which human rights are put in jeopardy.

But the whole country, not excepting the South, had a home in his patriotic, hospitable, and capacious heart.

He hated Slavery; but he loved his country in every part, with heart, soul, and mind.

He was of the Old Guard of Antislavery, and we bury him with the honors that belong to such a soldier.

But from his new-made grave he speaks now to the whole vast Republic, animating all good citizens to labor as he labored and to live as he lived, that this land may be redeemed.

Such a character must be mourned in Congress; but he will be mourned throughout the country, at all those virtuous firesides where fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters speak of those who have helped human happiness on earth.

And there is another company, who cannot yet pronounce his name, but, as they hear how truly he was their friend, will rise to call him blessed.

I think that Congress is as good an authority in its interpretation as the Supreme Court, and I hope that in legislation it will proceed absolutely without respect to a decision which has disgraced the country, and ought to be expelled…

Now, if a tribunal honored like the Supreme Court should undertake to declare that two and two make five, and a Senator as distinguished as the Senator from Maryland should uphold the high tribunal in its decision, I am not satisfied that…

But the Dred Scott decision was as absurd and irrational as such a reversal of the multiplication table, besides shocking the moral sense of mankind.

I claim nothing for myself; I may be weak; but, according to the measure of my abilities as God has given them to me, I enter a standing protest against that atrocious judgment, which was false in law, and also false in the history with…

The whole execrable pretension of “property in men,” wherever it now shows its audacious front, will be driven back into kindred night.

Among the influences and agencies that helped forward the present Rebellion, and set fellow-citizens in bloody conflict with each other, the Dred Scott decision must always be held in dismal memory.

It became the platform of Slavery, whose tyrannical behests would have triumphed, had this decision been allowed to prevail.

Hating the Rebellion in its origin and all the circumstances that nursed it into wicked being, we must hate this decision.

Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.