| The case a genuine proceeding. |
There is certainly not the slightest evidence in this history of the case that the case was anything but a genuine proceeding from beginning to end, conducted by anti-slavery men, for the purpose of securing the freedom of an intelligent and worthy African, who had been taken voluntarily by his master upon free soil, and had thus been made, by the principles of the common law, a free man.
| The decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. |
The case was argued twice with great learning before the Supreme Court, and the decision finally reached was virtually acquiesced in by seven of the nine Justices, although Justice Nelson did not give his assent to any part of the opinion except that which decided that, on the return of Dred to Missouri with his master, any effect upon his slavery, which the taking of him into Illinois and the Louisiana territory above the latitude thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes might have had, disappeared. This seemed to Justice Nelson sufficient to the decision of the case, and he was unwilling to go farther, but some of his brethren, especially Justice Wayne, thought that the entire record of the case in the Circuit Court was brought up for examination by the Supreme Court, and that the Supreme Court ought to decide every point contained in the record. Justice Nelson had been, at first, selected by his colleagues to write the opinion, and it is thought that this attitude of his was what moved the Chief Justice to write the opinion himself.
Justice Catron also thought that there was nothing before the Supreme Court but the question whether, after the return of the Scotts to Missouri, their temporary sojourn on free territory could be held to have worked their emancipation. Justice Catron presided at the trial in the Circuit Court and ruled, as we have seen, in favor of Dred Scott on the point of his having a standing in the United States Courts, and the Justice thought that Scott could not bring up to the Supreme Court, on a writ of error, a point decided in his favor in the court below.
The Chief Justice, Mr. Taney, held that there were two leading questions presented by the record from the Circuit Court. The first was the question whether the Circuit Court had jurisdiction over the case, and the second was whether the judgment it gave was correct or erroneous.
The Chief Justice was right in holding that the writ of error brought up the entire record for examination by the Supreme Court, but it was not necessary that the Supreme Court should include every point of the record in its decision. And he was certainly wrong when he extended, as is now generally conceded he did, the opinion of the court beyond the points in the record of the case in the Circuit Court. The form of the judgment pronounced by the Chief Justice as the opinion of the Court, that is, of the majority of the Justices, was that the Circuit Court did not have jurisdiction of the case, since the Scotts were not citizens of Missouri, in the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, and that the judgment of the Circuit Court for the defendant must, therefore, be set aside, and a mandate be issued, directing the suit to be dismissed by the Circuit Court for want of jurisdiction. The Chief Justice undertook to sustain his opinion by a long argument, the principal propositions of which were, that negroes descended from negro slaves held in this country were not citizens in any of the "States" of the Union at the time of the formation of the Constitution of 1787; that by that Constitution the "States" transferred all power to make new classes of persons citizens to the Congress of the United States, and limited the power of Congress in this respect to the naturalization of persons born outside of the dominion of the United States; and that, consequently, negroes born of negro slave parents in the United States were not only not citizens of any of the "States" at the time of the formation of the Constitution of 1787, but could not be made such, either by the "States" or by Congress, subsequent to the adoption of that Constitution.