LITMIR.BIZ

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of that Supreme Court whose decisions rise above congressional enactment and set aside statutes—that court from whose judgments there is nowhere any appeal to any other authority on earth—in behalf of their most extreme contentions.

      If that decision had been accepted by the people, as the decisions of the Supreme Court usually are, it would indeed have made slavery a national institution subject only to such limitations as the individual states might impose upon it within their own borders and without interference with slaveholders who might choose to take their slaves into free states and hold them there.

      But the victory of the slave advocates—complete as it was—gave them no practical advantage. Such a doctrine as that laid down by the court simply could not find acceptance in the minds of men at the North. Logically it ought not to have found acceptance with the ultra pro-slavery men of the South for the reason that it distinctly negatived that contention for states' rights and state sovereignty upon which they relied in their contest with their adversaries.

      Unfortunately for them, in the course of his decision Chief Justice Taney used one unhappy phrase which gave even greater offense perhaps than the decision itself did. That phrase was in fact no part of the decision but was what the lawyers call an obiter dictum—a saying apart. It was a mere statement of what the Chief Justice believed to be a fact of history. It was not at all a ruling of the court. As an illustration of his meaning he made the perfectly true statement that before the time of the American Revolution—and he might have included a much later date—the negroes "had been regarded as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

      This statement of fact as to the attitude of the public mind toward the negro before the Revolution was entirely correct, as every educated reader knows, and as the history of the African slave-trade—carried on not only before the adoption of the Constitution but for a dozen years after 1808 when the constitutional prohibition of that nefarious traffic went into effect—perfectly and completely shows.

      But Chief Justice Taney's simple statement of this historical fact was everywhere interpreted to be a part of his legal decision. This was natural enough under the circumstances for the reason that slavery itself, in behalf of which the decision seemed to have been rendered, rested solely upon the doctrine that a negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.

      Even if this unfortunate phrase had not been used and even if it had not been misinterpreted as it was, the decision itself must of necessity have wrought something like a revolution in the thought of the Northern people. The most conservative among them had reconciled themselves to the existence of slavery in certain of the states upon the ground that each state had a right to legislate for itself upon that question and therefore that each state was alone responsible for its own legislation. They were startled now by the challenge of a Supreme Court decision which denied to them even this relief of conscience and even this liberty of individual state action. They were asked to accept the doctrine that slavery was a national institution against which state laws were futile except in a very limited way.

      This extreme decision in favor of slavery, coming as it did at the very time when civil war was on in Kansas, not only inflamed public sentiment at the North but alarmed it. Already the political party opposed to the extension of slavery had mightily grown in numbers and in enthusiasm. In 1852 it had cast less than 157,000 votes. In 1856 its vote amounted to 1,341,264, carrying with it 114 electoral votes as against 174 secured by its chief antagonist and eight thrown away on a third candidate.

      During that four years the Anti-slavery party had drawn to itself through force of circumstance all of the Free-soil Democracy and the greater part of the Northern Whigs.

      In 1856 for the first time in the Republic's history the election of a president was contested by a party strictly sectional in its composition and the fact was alarming not only at the South but almost equally so at the North. The conviction was general that such a contest meant mischief for the country. It was the first sure foreboding of that war which was destined to come a little later between the sections.

      The Republican party existed exclusively at the North. It made no pretense of existing in the Southern half of the Republic. It did not even go through the empty form of nominating electors in the Southern states either in 1856 or four years later in 1860. It did not hope in either of those years for a single electoral vote from any state lying south of the Potomac or the Ohio. Its purpose was to carry the election and to control the country by a strictly sectional and geographical vote—a thing that had never before been attempted or thought of by any party, and a thing the very suggestion of which caused great alarm throughout the country. For, men anxiously asked, if one section of the Union is thus to dominate the other how shall we be able to maintain the Union in its present disturbed and distracted condition? Hitherto, they reflected, majorities have been drawn from all the states in contests that were purely national in their inspiration and in their significance, and all men have held themselves bound to submit to the will of such majorities, as representing the ultimate judgment of all the states and all the people; but, they anxiously asked themselves, how long will the states or the people of one part of the country consent to be governed by the elected candidates of a party which exists solely in the other part of the country; a party which does not even ask for votes except in that other part, in support of its candidates; a party whose platform is one of avowed hostility to the industrial, social and domestic labor system of the southern half of the Republic; a party which has no existence or recognition or representation in that part of the Union, and which includes among its most active and aggressive members those who openly declare their purpose to overthrow the domestic institutions of the South, in defiance of all constitutional guarantees, and by any means that may be available, even including servile war in states where the negroes outnumber the whites by two or three to one?

      Considerations of this kind undoubtedly restrained many voters at the North in the election of 1856, and for a time after that election there seemed to be a promise of peace in the influence of conservatism on the one side and on the other in spite of what was going on in Kansas.

      At the same time the state of feeling throughout the country was well-nigh indistinguishable from that which prevails during the existence of actual civil war. Only the old devotion to the Union which existed in both the Northern and Southern mind prevented men from flying at each other's throats.

      Then, as if to emphasize the inevitableness of war and to hasten its coming, there occurred the raid of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in the autumn of 1859—only a year before a presidential election must occur.

      John Brown had been the chief leader of the Free State men in the warlike operations in Kansas. He was a man of extraordinary fanaticism, limitless daring, large capacity, and relentless determination. His hostility to slavery knew absolutely no bounds. With a courage which had no balance wheel of discretion to regulate it, he had no hesitation in undertaking great enterprises with ridiculously inadequate means, and in the end he showed that he had no flinching from the personal consequences of his acts.

       In June, 1859, he went secretly to the neighborhood of Harper's Ferry, with a band so small that even after its reinforcement it was manifestly inadequate to be trusted by any but a madman to accomplish the work that Brown had laid out for it to do. He was both morally and materially supported by men of wealth and influence at the North who blindly entrusted him with arms, ammunition, and money, not knowing or inquiring whither he was going or what his purposes might be.

      By the end of June, 1859, he had established himself near Harper's Ferry with a band of devoted followers about him. One by one the men who had enlisted in his service joined him until the company numbered twenty-two. Still his purpose was wholly unsuspected by his Virginian neighbors.

      In the meanwhile the two hundred rifles contributed by George L. Stearns of Medford, Mass., in aid of the Kansas controversy, were delivered to John Brown who had, besides, a war chest of five hundred dollars in gold given to him by Boston enthusiasts in aid of an enterprise concerning which they had no definite information whatsoever.

      His

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