The life and public services of Abraham Lincoln ... together with his state papers, including his speeches, addresses, messages, letters, and proclamations, and the closing scenes connected with his life and death. By Henry J. Raymond. To which are added anecdotes and personal reminiscences of President Lincoln, by Frank B. Carpenter.

STATE PAPERS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 59
So&ereignty. It was not exactly Popular Sovereignty, but Squatter
Sovereignty. What do those terms mean? What do those terms mean
when used now? And vast credit is taken by our friend, the Judge, in
regard to his support of it, when he declares the last years of his life have
been, and all the future years of his life shall be, devoted to this matter
of popular sovereignty. What is it? Why, it is the sovereignty of the
people I What was Squatter Sovereignty? I suppose, if it had any significance at all, it was the right of the people to govern themselves, to be
sovereign in their own affairs, while they were squatted down in a
country not their own-while they had squatted on a Territory that did
not belong to them, in the sense that a State belongs to the people who
inhabit it-when it belonged to the nation-such right to govern themselves was called " Squatter Sovereignty."
Now I wish you to mark. What has become of that Squatter Sovereignty What has become of it? Can you get anybody to tell you now
that the people of a Territory have any authority to govern themselves,
in regard to this mooted question of slavery, before they form a State
Constitution? No such thing at all, although there is a general running
fire, and although there has been a hurrah made in every speech on that
side, assuming that policy had given the people of a Territory tile right
to govern themselves upon this question; yet the point is dodged. Today it has been decided-no more than a year ago it was decided by the
Supreme Court of the United States, and is insisted upon to-day, that the
people of a Territory have no right to exclude slavery from a Territory,
that if any one man chooses to take slaves into a Territory, all the rest
of the people have no right to keep them out. This being so, and this
decision being made one of the points that the Judge approved, and one
in the approval of which he says he means to keep me down-put me
down I should not say, for I have never been up. He says he is in favor
of it, and sticks to it, and expects to win his battle on that decision,
which says that there is no such thing as Squatter Sovereignty; but that
any one man may take slaves into a Territory, and all the other men in
the Territory may be opposed to it, and yet by reason of the Constitution
they cannot prohibit it. When that is so, how much is left of this vaat
matter of Squatter Sovereignty, I should like to know?
The Lecompton Constitution and its fate were next discussed, and then Mr. Lincoln proceeded to reply to the
inferences which his opponent had so characteristically
but unwarrantably drawn from the introductory paragraph of his Springfield speech. He said:
In this paragraph which I have quoted in your hearing, and to which I
ask the attention of all, Judge Douglas thinks he discovers great political