competent to decide whether Dred Scott was or was not a slave under the laws of Missouri. Scott was a slave before he left the state, and we can understand no reason why his temporary residence at the United States military posts in Illinois or other free states, should have operated his freedom, so that on his return to Missouri he could not be legally held as a slave under her laws. His being employed at the United States military posts makes in our judginent some difference in the case, for while residing at them he was still constructively in Missouri. Had he chosen when in Illinois to leave his master, a question, however, might arise, whether he could have been recovered as a fugitive slave. But he having remained with his master and returned with him to Missouri, we think the court was quite right in still regarding him as a slave. We are disposed to agree with the court, that a slave brought by his master into a free state with a view merely of a temporal sojourn there does not recover his freedom, so that if he returns to the state in which he was a slave he becomes there a free man. He is free only in the sense that so long as he resides in a free state he cannot be recovered under the fugitive-slave law. We do not think that New York can endow a person held as a slave in South Carolina with any rights of citizenship which will make him a free citizen everywhere in the Union. If this is the opinion of the court we do not see that it can be objected to. But the doctrine that persons of the negro race are not included in our political community and cannot be citizens of the United States, we are not yet prepared to accept. Negroes are men, and may be freemen, and the essential character of a citizen is that he is a freeman. Every freeman born. within the jurisdiction of the United States, of parents not citizens or subjects of a foreign state, is a citizen in every state of the Union, whatever was the condition of his ancestors or the race from which he sprang. This is necessarily so because our institutions recognize among freemen no distinction of rank or race. There were free negroes in several, perhaps in all the states at the time of forming the Union, and they were an integral portion of that people of the states who formed the Union and for whom it was formed. The negro being a man, a human soul, endowed by the law of nature with all the rights of a white man, he must in all things be held the equal of white men, except where the municipal law makes a distinction to his prejudice. Is there any clause in the constitution which excludes negroes from our political community, or that restricts that community to the white race? The court will not pretend it. Is there any clause which recognizes negroes, as such, as slaves, and declares them incapable of being freemen? Certainly not. How then can the court pretend that negroes born in the country and born free or freed by their masters or by the operations of law are not citizens? They may be, we need not tell the court, citizens, entitled to the protection of the Union, and capable of holding and transmitting real estate, and of suing and being sued in the courts, state and federal, without being electors. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York confer on negroes the right of suffrage, and make no political or legal distinction between them and white citizens. Suppose one of these negroes, whose ancestors were indeed imported from Africa as slaves, but have never themselves been slaves in other states, should emigrate to Kansas and seek to beome a landholder there, could he not do it? Will the court say that he would be incapable of owning and transmitting landed estate, or maintaining actions in the federal courts of the territory? What rights has a white man in that territory that he would not have? How then say that negroes are not citizens of the United States? Mr. Chief Justice Taney rests the opinion of the court on the estimation in which the negro race was held at the time the Union was formed. They were regarded as no fit associates socially or politically for white men, as having no rights which white men were bound to respect, while nobody denied that they might be bought and sold as an ordinary article of merchandise. Suppose such was the fact, what has that to do with the question? Is it any where incorporated into the constitution of the Union, or recognized by the laws of the United States? Of course not. Then it cannot be cited against the rights of free negroes under the federal government. But we dispute the fact. There can be no reasonable doubt that Mr. Jefferson and many others when they declared all men created equal intended the principle they asserted after Pope Alexander III., should apply in its fullest extent. Mr. Chief Justice Taney is a Catholic, and knows that from 1482 the popes have condemned, on pain of excommunication, the reduction of African negroes to slavery, and he knows that Mr. Jefferson, in his draft of the declaration of independence, enumerated among the things which justified the colonies in severing the tie which bound them to Great Britain and in casting off their allegiance to the British crown, the fact that the crown had refused its assent to the laws prohibiting the importation of negroes from Africa to be held as slaves. There was too at the adoption of the federal constitution already rising throughout the civilized world a strong opinion against the justice of negro slavery. The right to buy and sell negroes, already slaves, as an ordinary article of merchandise, was very generally held, I grant, but the right to buy and sell free negroes, or to reduce free negroes to slavery, was denied by the Catholic Church, and was, I would fain believe, held by very few. There were then free negroes as well as now; if everybody regarded it lawful to reduce negroes as such to slavery, or looked upon them as having no rights which white men were bound to respect, what was the difference between a free negro and a negro slave? How can a man who has no rights which all others are bound to respect be said to be free? Mr. Chief Justice Taney seems to us to proceed on the assumption that negroes are politically and legally a degraded race in the Union; but such is not the fact. They may be so in some of the states, but they are not so in the Union, nor indeed in all the states. We regret that in giving the opinion of the court the learned judge did not recollect what he is taught by his religion, namely, the unity of the race, that all men by the natural law are equal, and that negroes are men, and therefore as to their rights must be regarded as standing on the same footing with white men, where there is no positive or municipal law that degrades them. Here is what we dare maintain is the error of the court. We admit that negroes, but not negroes any more than white men, may be reduced by positive law to slavery, but planting ourselves on the constitution, and natural right as expounded by the church and the common law, we maintain, and will maintain in face of all civil courts, that where no such law reduces the negro to slavery, he is a free man, and in the absence of all municipal regulations to the contrary has equal rights with the white man. Neither race nor complexion disables a man under our federal system. That negroes may be citizens and possess equal rights with white men is proved by the fact that we have made them so in the territories acquired from France, Spain and Mexico, by the very treaties by which we acquired those territories. The opinion of the court belongs to an epoch prior to the introduction of Christianity, and is more in accordance with the teaching of Aristotle than with that of the Gospel. We have no more disposition to interfere with slavery where it legally exists than have our southern friends, but we do protest against an opinion which places negroes as such not only out of the pale of our republic, but out of the pale of humanity. If opinion once went that length, it was the business of the court to brand it with its disapprobation, and not to recognize it as law. The court should lean to the side of the weak, and set its face against oppression. The negro race is, no doubt, inferior to the white race, but is that a reason why they should be enslaved, or why the court should join the stronger against the weaker? The opinion of the court which allows the slaveholder to sojourn temporarily with his slaves in a free state, or to hold them in transitu through a free state, we think is just; but the opinion incidentally expressed, that a slaveholder may settle with his people and hold them as slaves in any territory of the United States, we cannot accept, for reasons assigned in the earlier part of this article. We have anticipated, and we think we have refuted, the reasoning of the court on this point. If we have not done it, Judge McLean has, and effectually. These are some of the exceptions we have felt bound to take to the opinion of the court, as it has been reported to us. Of course, we are aware there is no appeal from the supreme court, and its opinion must stand as law till it is set aside. Though we take exceptions to it, and believe it in several respects erroneous, we trust we shall not forget our duty as a loyal citizen. For ourselves personally, we believe liberty is more interested in the preservation of the Union than even in preventing the extension of slave territory, since, if the slave trade be not revived, the extension of slave territory involves no real extension of slavery. But we regret the decision, for we foresee that it will be impossible to prevent the anti-slavery agitation from being pushed on with new vigor, and with more danger than ever. The decision will be regarded as an extreme southern opinion, and the dissent from the majority by the ablest judges from the free states will deprive it of all moral force out of the slave states. We almost fear for the safety of the Union. Yet we believe Almighty God has great designs with regard to the American people, and we will trust in his good providence to carry us safely through the present crisis, the most dangerous that has as yet occurred in our history. POLITICS AT HOME. [From Brownson's Quarterly Review for July, 1860.] THOUGH Open to essays on political science and the relations of politics to religion and morality, the pages of the Review are for the most part closed to the discussion of the respective merits of political parties, or of political questions which involve no great and important social principle;not indeed because we hold the triumph or defeat of this or that party to be a matter of indifference, or because we hold it lawful to be unmindful of one's rights or duties as a citizen of a great and growing republic; but because we have not found a public sufficiently enlightened and tolerant to permit us to engage in party politics without detriment to the more important religious and philosophical purposes to which they are primarily devoted. The constitution and laws guaranty us the most perfect freedom of thought and speech, but public opinion, which in a democracy is supreme and reigns as a despot, exercises here a more effectual restraint on both thought and speech than is or can be exercised by the most arbitrary and despotic government in the Old World. The journal that undertakes to enlighten and correct the opinion of its own public has no lease of life, and it will be as speedily and as effectually suppressed with us, as by the police in France would be a journal that should dare question the wisdom or justice of the imperial régime, or the imperial policy. No periodical with us can live except on condition of pleasing the special public it addresses, and that public, be it what it will, is impatient of contradiction, and requires the journal it supports not simply to tell it what is true, right, and just, but to defend its opinions, prejudices, sympathies, and antipathies. It supports a journal only on condition that it is devoted to its |