wice argued, and finally decided in 1856; Chief Justice Taney
delivering the opinion of the Court. The facts and result of that case
are well known. In a cause dismissed for want of jurisdiction, this
Court pretended to decide that no person of African slave descent could
ever be a citizen of the United States, and that the adoption of the
Missouri Compromise line by the Congress of 1820, acquiesced in for
thirty-five years, was unconstitutional. This doctrine was entirely
extrajudicial, and, as one of the judges declared, "_an assumption_ of
authority."

We do not propose to discuss this decision. It was the lowest depth. It
probably did more than all legislative and executive usurpations to
revive the spirit of liberty,--to recall the country to the principles
of the founders of the Constitution. It began the good work,--_evoking_
the truth, by showing its own fiendish principles,--which the war is
likely to finish forever. We wish, however, to give an analysis of the
doctrines and reasons on which his decision was based, and therefrom to
show what is the true place of Roger Brooke Taney as a jurist and a
patriot.

Now the course of his argument was this,--admitting that all persons who
were citizens of the several States at the time of the adoption of the
Constitution became citizens of the United States, to show that persons
of African descent, whose ancestors had been slaves, were not in any
State citizens.

And first, he tries to show this "by the legislation and histories of
the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence";
and after referring to the laws of two or three Colonies restricting
intermarriage of races, and affirming that, though freed, colored
persons were in all the Colonies held to be no part of the people, and
declaring that "in no nation was this opinion more uniformly acted upon
than by the English government and people," admitting that "the general
words '_all men_ are created equal,' etc., would seem to embrace the
whole human family," and that the framers of the Declaration were "high
in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles
inconsistent with those on which they were acting," he argues that,
because they had not fully carried out, and did not afterwards fully
carry out, their avowed principles by instant and universal
emancipation, therefore he can give to as plain and absolute words as
were ever written, expressive of universal laws, a force just