Disunion Feed

"At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, all free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens. [...] when a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men"

Curtis answers Taney with the record: Black men voted in five of the ratifying states, which is difficult to square with a claim that they were never meant to be citizens. He resigned from the Court within months — the only justice in its history to leave over a decision. The two fragments are from different parts of the dissent, joined with [...].

Read it in the original — Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), Curtis dissenting ↗

"Chief Justice Taney delivered to-day the opinion of the U. S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. The points are that Scott is not a citizen; that he was not manumitted by being taken by his master when a slave into the then Territory of Illinois, and that the Missouri Compromise was an act unconstitutionally passed by Congress. [...] Five of the Judges are slaveholders, and two of the other four owe their appointments to their facile ingenuity in making State laws bend to Federal demands in behalf of "the Southern institution.""

The news arrives as a wire dispatch — datelined Washington, March 6 — and the Journal prints the holding and its own verdict on the bench in the same breath. The paper's count of slaveholding justices was accurate: Taney, Wayne, Catron, Daniel and Campbell all owned or had owned slaves.

Read it in the original — Albany Evening Journal, Mar 7, 1857 ↗