ous Congress.

Though the new House did not organize till a year after it was elected,
the certainty of its coming action was sufficient not only to restore,
but greatly to accelerate the pro-slavery reaction begun by the repeal
of the Missouri Compromise. This impending drift of national policy now
received a powerful impetus by an act of the third cooerdinate branch,
the judicial department of the government.

Very unexpectedly to the public at large, the Supreme Court of the
United States, a few days after Buchanan's inauguration, announced its
judgment in what quickly became famous as the Dred Scott decision. Dred
Scott, a negro slave in Missouri, sued for his freedom on the ground
that his master had taken him to reside in the State of Illinois and
the Territory of Wisconsin, where slavery was prohibited by law. The
question had been twice decided by Missouri courts, once for and then
against Dred Scott's claim; and now the Supreme Court of the United
States, after hearing the case twice elaborately argued by eminent
counsel, finally decided that Dred Scott, being a negro, could not
become a citizen, and therefore was not entitled to bring suit. This
branch, under ordinary precedent, simply threw the case out of court;
but in addition, the decision, proceeding with what lawyers call _obiter
dictum_, went on to declare that under the Constitution of the United
States neither Congress nor a territorial legislature possessed power to
prohibit slavery in Federal Territories.

The whole country immediately flared up with the agitation of the
slavery question in this new form. The South defended the decision with
heat, the North protested against it with indignation, and the
controversy was greatly intensified by a phrase in the opinion of Chief
Justice Taney, that at the time of the Declaration of Independence
negroes were considered by general public opinion to be so far inferior
"that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

This decision of the Supreme Court placed Senator Douglas in a curious
dilemma. While it served to indorse and fortify his course in repealing
the Missouri Compromise, it, on the other hand, totally negatived his
theory by which he had sought to make the repeal palatable, that the
people of a Territory, by the exercise of his great principle of popular
sovereignty, could decide the slavery question for themselves. But,
being a subtle sophist, he sought to maintain a show o