negroes
were not entitled to freedom. Three judges formed the court, and two
of them joined in an opinion bearing internal evidence that it was
prompted, not by considerations of law and justice, but by a spirit of
retaliation growing out of the ineradicable antagonism of freedom and
slavery.

[Sidenote] Scott, J., 15 Mo. Reports, pp. 582-6.

Every State [says the opinion] has the right of determining how
far, in a spirit of comity, it will respect the laws of other
States. Those laws have no intrinsic right to be enforced beyond
the limits of the State for which they were enacted. The respect
allowed them will depend altogether on their conformity to the
policy of our institutions. No State is bound to carry into effect
enactments conceived in a spirit hostile to that which pervades
her own laws.... It is a humiliating spectacle to see the courts
of a State confiscating the property of her own citizens by the
command of a foreign law.... Times now are not as they were when
the former decisions on this subject were made. Since then not
only individuals but States have been possessed with a dark and
fell spirit in relation to slavery, whose gratification is sought
in the pursuit of measures whose inevitable consequence must be
the overthrow and destruction of our Government. Under such
circumstances it does not behoove the State of Missouri to show
the least countenance to any measure which might gratify this
spirit. She is willing to assume her full responsibility for the
existence slavery within her limits, nor does she seek to share or
divide it with others.

To this partisan bravado the third judge replied with a dignified
rebuke; in his dissenting opinion he said:

[Sidenote] Gamble, J., 15 Mo. Reports, pp. 589-92.

As citizens of a slave-holding State, we have no right to complain
of our neighbors of Illinois, because they introduce into their
State Constitution a prohibition of slavery; nor has any citizen
of Missouri who removes with his slave to Illinois a right to
complain that the fundamental law of the State to which he
removes, and in which he makes his residence, dissolves the
relation between him and his slave. It is as much his own
voluntary act as if he had executed a deed of emancipation....
There is with me nothing in the law relating to slavery which
distinguishes it from