cases will be decided when they arise. For the latter use, they are
called "precedents" and "authorities."

We believe as much as Judge Douglas (perhaps more) in obedience to and
respect for the judicial department of government. We think its
decisions on constitutional questions, when fully settled, should
control not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of
the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the
Constitution, as provided in that instrument itself. More than this
would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous.
We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions,
and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this. We offer no
resistance to it.

Judicial decisions are of greater or less authority as precedents
according to circumstances. That this should be so, accords both with
common-sense and the customary understanding of the legal profession.

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of
the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance
with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the
departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on
assumed historical facts, which are not really true; or if wanting in
some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had
there been affirmed and reaffirmed through a course of years,--it then
might be, perhaps would be factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to
acquiesce in it as a precedent.

But when, as is true, we find it wanting in all these claims to the
public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not
even disrespectful to treat it as not having yet quite established a
settled doctrine for the country.

I have said in substance, that the Dred Scott decision was in part based
on assumed historical facts which were not really true, and I ought not
to leave the subject without giving some reasons for saying this, I
therefore give an instance or two, which I think fully sustain me. Chief
Justice Taney, in delivering the opinion of the majority of the court,
insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who
made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence, or the
Constitution of the United States.

On the contrary, Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in
five of the then thirteen States--to wit, New Hampshire, Massachusetts,
New