re the court nearly a year before the judges gave out their
opinion that Scott was not a citizen of the United States, and that,
therefore, he could not sue in the federal courts. The case was
dismissed. But the judges granted a rehearing of the case, and in March,
1857, hoping to assist the country to a peaceful solution of the slavery
problem, gave out a so-called _dictum_, which it had been the custom of
the court occasionally to submit to the public.[9] In this document the
judges said that the negro was property, and that as such the Federal
Government must protect it in the Territories. This was the Calhoun
doctrine, and the South rejoiced immoderately; the Republicans now began
to realize that the courts were in alliance with the slave-power, and
they were forced to attack the most sacred political institution in the
country.

[Footnote 9: Chief Justice Marshall had set the example for this in his
Marbury _vs._ Madison _dictum_.]

Both parties turned to Kansas to see what could be won there. During the
spring of 1856, when Sumner and Brooks were manifesting the spirit of
the members of Congress, the Southern and Northern groups in Kansas
carried their warfare to similar extremes. Lawrence was destroyed by the
pro-slavery men; the anti-slavery men returned the stroke in the
massacres on Pottawatomie Creek. John Brown, a fanatical New England
emigrant, imagined himself to be commissioned of Heaven to kill all the
pro-slavery people who fell into his hands, and he did a bloody work
which under other conditions would have been counted as murder and
denounced everywhere. But in the autumn of 1856 wealthy and benevolent
men in the North applauded him, gave him money, and held meetings in his
honor.

Into a Kansas frenzied with the work of Brown on the one side and that
of the "border ruffians," as the Missourians were called, on the other,
the President sent Robert J. Walker as governor, commissioned to solve
the insoluble problem. So great was the faith of the country in Walker
that he was hailed as the next President of the United States by
fair-minded men and important newspapers. Walker called an election for
a constitutional convention. Again the Missourians participated, and the
Lecompton constitution was the result. The Free-State men refused to
recognize the convention unless the new constitution should be submitted
to a fair vote. This the convention refused to do, and the governor
appealed to the President