d and received universal rebuke and reprobation.

He then applied the facts thus assumed as follows:

[Sidenote] Ibid., pp. 425-6.

The only two provisions which point to them and include them treat
them as property, and make it the duty of the Government to
protect it; no other power in relation to this race is to be found
in the Constitution.... No one, we presume, supposes that any
change in public opinion or feeling in relation to this
unfortunate race, in the civilized nations of Europe or in this
country, should induce the court to give to the words of the
Constitution a more liberal construction in their favor than
they were intended to bear when the instrument was framed and
adopted.... It is not only the same in words, but the same in
meaning, and delegates the same powers to the Government, and
reserves and secures the same rights and privileges to the
citizen; and as long as it continues to exist in its present form,
it speaks not only in the same words but with the same meaning and
intent with which it spoke when it came from the hands of its
framers and was voted on and adopted by the people of the United
States.

This cold and pitiless historical delineation of the bondage,
ignorance, and degradation of the unfortunate kidnaped Africans and
their descendants in a by-gone century, as an immutable basis of
constitutional interpretation, was met by loud and indignant protest
from the North. The people and press of that section seized upon the
salient phrase of the statement, and applying it in the present tense,
accused the Chief-Justice with saying that "a negro has no rights
which a white man is bound to respect." This was certainly a
distortion of his exact words and meaning; yet the exaggeration was
more than half excusable, in view of the literal and unbending rigor
with which he proclaimed the constitutional disability of the entire
African race in the United States, and denied their birthright in the
Declaration of Independence. His unmerciful logic made the black
before the law less than a slave; it reduced him to the status of a
horse or dog, a bale of dry-goods or a block of stone. Against such a
debasement of any living image of the Divine Maker the resentment of
the public conscience of the North was quick and unsparing.

Had Chief-Justice Taney's delineation been historically correct, it
would have been nevertheless unwis