the law on any other subject, or allows any
more accommodation to the temporary public excitements which are
gathered around it.... In this State it has been recognized from
the beginning of the government, as a correct position in law,
that a master who takes his slave to reside in a State or Territory
where slavery is prohibited thereby emancipates his slave. [Citing
cases.] ... But the Supreme Court of Missouri, so far from
standing alone on this question, is supported by the decisions of
other slave-States, including those in which it may be supposed
there was the least disposition to favor emancipation. [Citing
cases.] ... Times may have changed, public feeling may have
changed, but principles have not and do not change; and in my
judgment there can be no safe basis for judicial decision but in
those principles which are immutable.

These utterances, it must be remembered, occurred in the year 1852,
when all slavery agitation was supposed to have been forever settled.
They show conclusively that the calm was superficial and delusive, and
that this deep-reaching contest was still, as before the adjustment of
1850, actually transforming the various institutions of society.
Gradually, and as yet unnoticed by the public, the motives disclosed
in these opinions were beginning to control courts of justice, and
popular discussion and excitement were not only shaping legislation,
but changing the tenor of legal decisions throughout the country.

Not long after the judgment by the Supreme Court of Missouri, Dred
Scott and his family were sold to a man named Sandford, who was a
citizen of New York. This circumstance afforded a ground for bringing
a similar action in a Federal tribunal, and accordingly Dred Scott
once more sued for freedom, in the United States Circuit Court at St.
Louis.[1] The case was tried in May, 1854, and a decree rendered that
they "were negro slaves, the lawful property" of Sandford. As a final
effort to obtain justice, they appealed by writ of error to the
Supreme Court of the United States, the highest judicial tribunal of
the nation.

Before this court of last resort the case was argued a first time in
the spring of 1856. The country had been for two years in a blaze of
political excitement. Civil war was raging in Kansas; Congress was in
a turmoil of partisan discussion; a Presidential election was
impending, and the whole people were anxiousl