CONSTITUTION - Amendments).
Unfortunately, the court did not confine itself to the case before it; but for the reasons above mentioned, and to answer for the public the arguments brought forward by counsel, who went out of their way to deliver a series of obiter dicta (personal judgments not needed or relevant for the case in hand, and therefore not law), which inflamed the public wrath im measurably as a fresh aggression of the slave power, have remained in public memory as the only interesting points in the case, and are, in fact, by far the most important aspects of it. These were three: in essence, that African negroes had never been recognized in Ameri can law or custom as persons; that Congress had no power to make regulations for the Ter ritories acquired after the Constitution was adopted, except under the Constitution, which recognized slaves as property; and that the Missouri Compromise, already repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, had never been constitu tional. (1) Of course no exception had been taken by Scott's counsel to the circuit court's ruling that negro blood was no bar to citizen ship; but the Supreme Court dragged it in and overruled it. In the counsel's statement of the condition of public opinion at the time of fram ing the Constitution, they used a phrase which is immortal in public memory, and usually sup posed to be their own decision as a point of present law; that negroes were then regarded as "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect? and to be rightfully made slaves for white men's benefit. The court held that they were regarded in the Constitution as only chattel property; were not included in the words "people" or in the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution, remained in this condition of civil nullity even when emancipated, had no rights except such as each State chose to grant them, and could not become citizens capable of suing and being sued. The dissenting judges pressed the notorious distinction between citi zenship and suffrage (See CITIZEN) ; called attention to the Constitution's repeated mention of the negroes as "persons," and to the fact that free negroes were actually voters in five of the States in 1787, and were so even yet save where the States had changed their Constitu tions to disfranchise them; and held that the civil rights of free negroes were the same at least as those of women and minors. (2) As
to the Territories, the obiter decision was that as the Constitution admitted slaves to be prop erty, and by the Fifth Amendment Congress had no right to take away any citizen's property without compensation, it had no right to make laws barring slave property from the Territories more than any other; that its rules and regula tions must be in conformity with the Consti tution. The dissenting judges held that both by common law and the Constitution slavery was a purely State institution (cf. Art. IV, I ii, par. 3: "No person held to service or labor in one etc.), sustainable only by State law and State police power of quelling resistance; that once out of the State's power, a slave instantly became free by the law of nature, and that State law could not follow him to the Territories. (3) The decision that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, as interfering with the natural right of a slave holder to take his property where he pleased, and with the constitutional equality of citizens of different States, followed from the court's opinion on the second point. The dissenting justices held that the Compromise was a right ful exercise of the constitutional power of Congress to legislate for the Territories, and never before questioned since the government was founded; and that it did not violate the equality of citizens because citizens could only hold slave property in States that permitted and enforced it.
The whole question was soon decided by the war. Scott and his family were inherited by Calvin S. Chaffee of Massachusetts (then in Congress), were conveyed by him to Taylor Blow of Saint Louis for emancipation, and were emancipated 26 May 1857. Consult decision in Howard's . . in the Case of Dred Scott> (1857) ; Benton, (Examination of . the Dred Scott (1860) ; Corwin, Dred Scott Decision in the Light of Contemporary Legal Doctrines,) in American Historical Review (Vol. XVII, 1911) ; Tyler, (Life of Taney) (Baltimore 1872) ; Curtis, G. T., (Life of B. R. Curtis) (Boston 1880). The Missouri Historical Society has a portrait of Scott, from a photograph.