2. That the Constitution recognizes the right of property in slaves, and recognizes no difference between such property and any other, and that therefore Congress could not limit the right of property in slaves, even in the territories.
3. That the Missouri Compromise, limiting the right of property in slaves, was unconstitutional, and therefore null and void; and that, therefore, slave owners could carry their slaves into any part of the territories, and hold them as such without regard to the line established by the Missouri Compromise.
The opinion was rendered by Chief Justice Taney,[[188]] and was assented to by a majority of the court. Justices McLean and Curtis, however, dissented, and Curtis presented an elaborate dissenting opinion. The importance of the decision lay in the fact that it was an authoritative approval by the Supreme Court of views advanced by Calhoun, and generally indorsed by the South.
419. The Dissenting Opinion.—The North, naturally, accepted the views of the dissenting opinion, which held:—
1. That free negroes had been citizens before the adoption of the Constitution.
2. That the Constitution had not limited the rights of such negroes as citizens.
3. That as many as seven Acts had been passed by Congress limiting slavery in the territories, and that these Acts had been assented to by Presidents who had been in the Constitutional Convention.
4. That the constitutionality of these Acts had never been questioned.
5. That the validity of the Missouri Compromise was not before the court, and that the dissenting Justices did “not hold any opinion of this court, or any court, binding when expressed on a question not legitimately before it.”
420. Influence of the Decision.—The far-reaching effects of this decision were at once apparent. The Republican party had been organized on the fundamental avowal that it was the duty of Congress to keep slavery out of the territories (§ [416]). But if Congress had no constitutional right to interfere with slavery in the territories, the Republican party could have no right to exist. The decision also shattered Douglas’s doctrine of Popular Sovereignty; for, if Congress had no right to exclude slavery, it could not confer such a right upon the territorial legislature. The South asked, “What are you going to do about it?” The North virtually replied that it adopted the view of Justice Curtis and rejected the decision as of no binding force. Many persons in the North accepted a doctrine that had some time before been promulgated by Mr. Seward,—that there is a “higher law” of right and morality than that of the Constitution.