14. All statutes—all amendments to the Constitution—in derogation of natural rights, should be strictly construed.
15. All statutes and amendments for the preservation of natural rights should be liberally construed. Every court should, by strict construction, narrow the scope of every law that infringes upon any natural human right; and every court should, by construction, give the broadest meaning to every statute or constitutional provision passed or adopted for the preservation of freedom.
16. In construing the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the Supreme Court need not go back to decisions rendered in the days of slavery—when every statute was construed in favor of the sovereignty of the State and the rights of the master. These amendments utterly obliterated such decisions. The Supreme Court should begin with the amendments. It need not look behind them. They are a part of the fundamental organic law of the nation. They were adopted to destroy the old statutes, to obliterate the infamous clauses in the Constitution, and to lay a new foundation for a new nation.
17. Congress has the power to eradicate all forms and incidents of slavery and involuntary servitude, by direct and primary legislation binding upon States and individuals alike. And when citizens are denied the exercise of common rights and privileges—when they are refused admittance to public inns and railway cars, on an equality with white persons—and when such denial and refusal are based upon race and color, such citizens are in a condition of involuntary servitude.
The Supreme Court has failed to take into consideration the intention of the framers of these amendments. It has failed to comprehend the spirit of the age. It has undervalued the accomplishment of the war. It has not grasped in all their height and depth the great amendments to the Constitution and the real object of government. To preserve liberty is the only use for government. There is no other excuse for legislatures, or presidents, or courts, for statutes or decisions. Liberty is not simply a means—it is an end. Take from our history, our literature, our laws, our hearts—that word, and we are naught but moulded clay. Liberty is the one priceless jewel. It includes and holds and is the weal and wealth of life. Liberty is the soil and light and rain—it is the plant and bud and flower and fruit—and in that sacred word lie all the seeds of progress, love and joy.
This decision, in my judgment, is not worthy of the Court by which it was delivered. It has given new life to the serpent of State Sovereignty. It has breathed upon the dying embers of ignorant hate. It has furnished food and drink, breath and blood, to prejudices that were perishing of famine, and in the old case of Civilization vs. Barbarism, it has given the defendant a new trial.
From this decision, John M. Harlan had the breadth of brain, the goodness of heart, and the loyalty to logic, to dissent. By the fortress of Liberty, one sentinel remains at his post. For moral courage I have supreme respect, and I admire that intellectual strength that breaks the cords and chains of prejudice and damned custom as though they were but threads woven in a spider's loom. This judge has associated his name with freedom, and he will be remembered as long as men are free.
We are told by the Supreme Court that:
"Slavery cannot exist without law, any more than property and lands and goods can exist without law."
I deny that property exists by virtue of law. I take exactly the opposite ground. It was the fact that man had property in lands and goods, that produced laws for the protection of such property. The Supreme Court has mistaken an effect for a cause. Laws passed for the protection of property, sprang from the possession and ownership of the thing to be protected. When one man enslaves another, it is a violation of all justice—a subversion of the foundation of all law. Statutes passed for the purpose of enabling man to enslave his fellow-man, resulted from a conspiracy entered into by the representatives of brute force. Nothing can be more absurd than to call such a statute, born of such a conspiracy a law. According to the idea of the Supreme Court, man never had property until he had passed a law upon the subject. The first man who gathered leaves upon which to sleep, did not own them, because no law had been passed on the leaf subject. The first man who gathered fruit—the first man who fashioned a club with which to defend himself from wild beasts, according to the Supreme Court, had no property in these things, because no laws had been passed, and no courts had published their decisions.