THE "DRED SCOTT" CASE. 265 that he, his wife, and children, were slaves. It was upon this plea that appeal was made to the Supreme Court. It has been ingeniously urged* that the decision amounted strictly to this, that the condition of citizenship within a state must be decided by the law of that state itself; a decision which itself would seem to offer the gravest obstacles to the due ascertainment of freedom. But the ground taken up by C. J. Taney and the majority of the Court was far more extensive, and the decision was, it may be said, accepted by public opinion as establishing, or endeavouring to establish, 1st, That free negroes could not be citizens of the United States, but only within the jurisdiction of particular states; 2nd, That so much of the Missouri Compromise Act as prohibited slavery in territories N. of lat. 36° 30', was unconstitutional, and that, consequently, Congress had no power to forbid slavery in any territory; 3rd, That the slave-owners of the South could go with their slaves wherever they pleased, into or out of states where slavery was most expressly prohibited, without the slaves acquiring any right to claim their freedom. It is difficult for an English lawyer to conceive the extent to which pro-slavery partizanship warped in this instance the judgment of one who is reputed a really great judge in his own country. Nothing, for instance, could seem clearer than the provision of the United States Constitution, that the * See "A Legal Review of the case of Dred Scott, as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, from the Law Reporter for June, 1857." Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Co., 1857. 266 CHIEF-JUSTICE TANEY'S ARGUMENTS. citizens of each state should be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in all. But in order to exclude negroes from citizenship, the Chief Judge held, 1st, That this provision was confined to those who were citizens of any state when the Constitution was adopted; 2nd, That negroes were not such citizens. He was not ashamed to argue this from the terms of an Act for the enrolment of "every free ablebodied white male citizen;" to which a colleague (Justice Curtis) answered very simply, that he might just as well have argued that all citizens were ablebodied or males, as that all were white. I cannot dwell here at length upon this monstrous judgment. But you will now feel for what purpose, in an earlier portion of this history, I called your attention to the fact, that out of the four men claimed by Jefferson from England as "American citizens" after the searching of the "Chesapeake," were men of colour; and to the style in which Jackson addressed the free coloured men of Louisiana during the war with England, treating them as "fellow-citizens" of the whites. Observe that, even prior to the date of this judgment, the Executive had issued orders to its foreign ministers to refuse passports to American-born persons of colour. Note also the refusal by the United States to accede to the terms of the Paris conferences of April, 1856, by which the chief European nations agreed to abolish privateering, to allow a neutral flag to cover enemy's goods, not being contraband of war,-to exempt from seizure under the enemy's flag neutral goods, not being THE PARIS CONFERENCES. 267 contraband of war,-and that blockades, to be respected, should be effectual. Every leading principle that America had ever contended for in such matters was thus granted; still she would not be satisfied, unless all private property at sea should be declared exempt from seizure. "Sumters" and "Nashvilles" have, ere this, made her bitterly feel the folly of her refusal. IN. OXFORD LECTURE VIII. FROM THE JUDGMENT IN THE DRED SCOTT CASE TO SECESSION (1856-1861)—THE SLAVE POWER AND THE SUPREME COURT -FREESOIL VICTORY IN KANSAS-OFFICIAL SCANDALS (Pierce, 1853 to 1857; Buchanan, 1857 to 1861.) It is impossible to exaggerate the historical importance of the Dred Scott case. The Supreme Court of the United States is invested with a quite peculiar importance among earthly tribunals, as the sovereign interpreter of the Constitution of a great nation. It represents the attempt to create a moral power, which, within certain limits, shall be superior to that of the nation itself, acting at once through its representative and its executive bodies. For, whilst with us, Parliament, as composed of King, Lords and Commons, is for all earthly purposes literally omnipotent, and any interpretation of the law by the very highest Court of Appeal can be nullified at once (and, indeed, in practice is nullified not unfrequently) by Act of Parliament; in the United States, on the contrary, there is no direct practical appeal from a decision of the Supreme Court, interpreting the Constitution, but THE SUPREME COURT DISCREDITED. 269 either to itself on another occasion, or, by means of amendment to the Constitution, to the nation at large, according to a certain specified and jealously devised procedure, requiring the assent of three-fourths of all the states; or, lastly, to the necessities of military law, in case of foreign or civil war. This enormous moral power with which the Supreme Court has been invested would evidently require for its exercise almost superhuman wisdom, moderation, and prudence. And it is to the credit of the American judiciary, that, in despite of the vagaries of many of the inferior and local courts, the decisions of the Supreme Court had, up to the time which we have reached, commanded universal respect. But now it was seen that this sovereign tribunal was itself enthralled to the slave-power; the national justice was corrupted in its very head-springs; right and wrong became henceforth no more judicial, but solely political questions, the arbitrament of which was to be sought only at the ballot-box, or, if the worst came to the worst, as it has now, at the cannon's mouth. For we must not forget that the "Dred Scott" decision came just in time to supplement, by legal authority, the numerical weakness of slavery; at a time when a Southern delegate was warning the Democratic connection that Kansas, Nebraska, and the other territories, could only be peopled with slaves at the expense of Maryland, Virginia, and Missouri, which would then become free; so that that decision could only be taken by the free states as judicially robbing them of the |