it from its own mistake? What I have next to say
is spoken with no emotion but regret. Our meeting to-day is, as it
were, at the grave, in the presence of eternity, and the truth must be
uttered in soberness and sincerity. In a great republic, as was
observed more than two thousand years ago, any attempt to overturn the
state owes its strength to aid from some branch of the government. The
Chief Justice of the United States, without any necessity or occasion,
volunteered to come to the rescue of the theory of slavery; and from
his court there lay no appeal but to the bar of humanity and history.
Against the Constitution, against the memory of the nation, against a
previous decision, against a series of enactments, he decided that the
slave is property; that slave property is entitled to no less
protection than any other property; that the Constitution upholds it
in every Territory against any act of a local legislature, and even
against Congress itself; or, as the President for that term tersely
promulgated the saying, "Kansas is as much a slave State as South
Carolina or Georgia; slavery, by virtue of the Constitution, exists in
every Territory." The municipal character of slavery being thus taken
away, and slave property decreed to be "sacred," the authority of the
courts was invoked to introduce it by the comity of law into States
where slavery had been abolished, and in one of the courts of the
United States a judge pronounced the African slave-trade legitimate,
and numerous and powerful advocates demanded its restoration.

Moreover, the Chief Justice, in his elaborate opinion, announced what
had never been heard from any magistrate of Greece or Rome; what was
unknown to civil law, and canon law, and feudal law, and common law,
and constitutional law; unknown to Jay, to Rutledge, Ellsworth and
Marshall--that there are "slave races." The spirit of evil is
intensely logical. Having the authority of this decision, five States
swiftly followed the earlier example of a sixth, and opened the way
for reducing the free negro to bondage; the migrating free negro
became a slave if he but entered within the jurisdiction of a seventh;
and an eighth, from its extent, and soil, and mineral resources,
destined to incalculable greatness, closed its eyes on its coming
prosperity, and enacted, as by Taney's dictum it had the right to do,
that every free black man who would live within its limits must
accept the condition of slavery