ments of these illustrious lawyers proceeded from the false fire of their overheated minds, the representatives of American judiciary should have viewed with pity and indulgence the infirmities and delusions which they have thus judicially decorated with their self-complacent censure. This chastisement was regarded by the public as carrying judicial pleasantry a little too far. The dignity and gravity of the Supreme Court of the United States, it was thought, could be displayed to more advantage in a frame of mind less emotional. The hotness of the ashes smouldering underneath this judicial opinion is quite perceptible on top when the court, losing sight of the constitutional abstractions which they had argued uncommonly well, departed entirely from the record to deliver a grave moral lesson, to utter a pious homily, to school and discipline colored humanity in the doctrines of humility; to caution it in the assertion of its civil rights, exhorting it not to walk erect, but more in accordance with the mediæval gait of Dred Scott.
When it is recalled that the Dred Scott decision was resisted by the law department of the United States in 1862[1]; that Mr. Chase, who took his seat as Chief Justice, soon afterwards admitted to practice a counsellor of African blood; that Mr. Buchanan, in his account of his administration, declared that the Republican party and the Douglas-Democrats, the two constituting a large majority, west, east, and north, repudiated the Dred Scott doctrine: that the Supreme Court twenty years thereafter should, in the face of the awful revolution which it precipitated, hold up Dred Scott as a mirror of civil rights, would not be readily believed without reading the opinion in the Civil-Rights Cases (109 U. S. p. 51); where the court, turning from the cold constitutional issues presented by the record, excitedly exclaim,—
"There were thousands of free colored people in this country before the abolition of slavery, enjoying all the essential rights of liberty, life, and property, the same as white citizens, yet no one at that time thought that it was any invasion of his personal status, as a freeman, because he was not admitted to all the
- ↑ General Bates's opinion, November 29, 1862.
