Dred Scott had something on Jack, the colored slave who was supposed to handle and brand the Maverick cattle, and didn't. For Dred had a last name; he got it in the papers; people made speeches about him; they fought a war over him.

But both Dred and Jack were blissfully ignorant of the fact that they were the symbols of great forces. For blind forces were working then, as now, which were not understood. John Brown made his raid in 1859. He had only eighteen men, five of whom were Negroes. That was not a very large army.

Slaves, counted by the millions, were quite complacent. There had been minor slave rebellions back a long time before, but the South had the slaves well in hand.

The South had "patrols" to keep the Negroes from going out at night. When I lived in Virginia with the Maurys, the old colored people still sang a song "The Pat-a-role Gonna Git You If You Don't Watch Out." In slavery times when they refused to work, they were whipped. In Louisiana, if they refused to go in the miasmic swamps, they were driven out to the fields, and killed if necessary.

It was generally understood the slave-owner was subject to no law whatever in reference to his "property." A slave could be whipped, imprisoned or even killed without the master being punished in any way.

I have lately seen some of the old documents of the Supreme Court. The Court did not keep the opinions until about 1880. But the record papers in the Dred Scott case, bound like an old copy book, are there.

I have lately seen some of the old documents of the Supreme Court. The Court did not keep the opinions until about 1880. But the record papers in the Dred Scott case, bound like an old copy book, are there.

I found on the front the words: "Dismissed for want of jurisdiction." Underneath, barely legible, one can just see words which had been erased: "Dismissed with costs." This shows the case was originally dropped. Then the words were carefully erased, and new words written over their traces.

In that case the Court went completely out of its way to declare the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, and to deliver, not one, but seven lengthy political speeches from the bench in the form of written "opinions." These speeches put the white men in a blood rage.

The true situation at the time must be understood. What, really, was the cause of all the discussion, the unrest? What was all the trouble about? Why did not the South just go on, happily singing its songs?

The answer is that the conscience of the white man—of decent men the world over—was ill at ease. England had finally abolished slavery throughout the Empire in 1811, and Parliament made slave trade a felony.

What Jefferson had clearly foreseen in 1776—eighty-five years earlier—was coming to pass. For indeed, Justice Taney thought, as Justice McReynolds recently said, that there was a "strange restlessness" over the land. Like Justice McReynolds, he had been on the bench so long that he no loger understood people or human forces.

And, like Justice McReynolds, he thought that he could settle human opinion, morals, manners, by sitting down in his black gown and writing on paper what Congress, the President, and millions of people should do for all eternity.

Mr. Justice Wayne, writing also for the majority, in agreement with Mr. Chief Justice Taney, said as follows:

"The case involves private rights of value, and constitutional principles of the highest importance, about which there had become such a difference of opinion, that the peace and harmony of the country required the settlement of them by judicial decision."

Private rights of value indeed! Constitutional principles! The ignorant, naive, blithe, arrogant assumption of wisdom—the idea that gigantic social forces, the whole conscience of humanity, could be stayed because a crabbed old man wrote "unconstitutional" on a piece of paper!

Taney's opinion is the thing. Taney, like Justice Hughes, was considered an intellectual "liberal." The slave-owners hailed his opinion as wise and learned. He was given a place almost by the side of God. The Liberty League slave-owners of that day praised the Supreme Court and the Constitution. And why not? They got what they wanted—they had a court that would tell humanity to shup up and be quiet.

But from the North and the West came rage. The legislatures of practically all those states denounced the opinion, and asked that the court be "re-constituted." They said the decision was "repugnant to the Constitution," "subversive of Liberty," and that "no state in honor can submit to it." They were right.

Let us study some of the points of this decision. It is over two hundred and fifty pages long, and that only represents a part of the case. It is one long tiresome jumble of five strained speeches not only approving the institution of slavery, but worse, extending it. There were two dissents.

The main points are just about this:

That all Negroes or persons of African descent, born free in a free state, were intended to be governed as "subjects" absolutely and despotically because they bore the "stigma of deepest degradation."

This was topped off with a statement that the Declaration of Independence had not intended to include the Negroes in its references to "the rights of man and the rights of people." In this particular point the Judge was right, but did not know it. For he did not cite, nor indicate his knowledge of, the deletion of the clause by Jefferson which denounced slavery.

This took away the American citizenship of many Negroes in free States who had enjoyed it by heredity and right since the Revolution. It simply took from them a right they already had under the Constitution.

Next, the Court held that a Southerner could no more be restrained from taking his "property" into the Western Territories than a Northerer could be prevented from taking his horses and cattle down South. Slave labor spelled breakdown and ruin for the white farmer of the West. More out of his desire to preserve himself from the competition of slave labor, the white man announced he would stand for no such decision of the Court.

For though Jefferson attempted to abolish slavery, it was he who brought to the United States the great territory of Louisiana. With that land, he brought this huge problem. The Conestoga wagons that lurched into this territory from the northern States carried only free white men, but the free white men in the wagon trains rumbling across from souther States had black slaves walking by their sides.

The problem was that a slave system and a free labor system did not mix. A slave system required a large holding of land, one-crop production, and a low standard of living for the workers. A free system meant small farms, diversified crops, independent, decent living standards and fair wages.

Everyone knows the Government of the United States had decided to compromise the issue thirty-seven years before the Dred Scott decision was delivered. Both houses of Congress (that's one branch of the Government) and the President (that's another) agreed to draw a line across the new territory, extending the southern boundary of Missouri, and to keep slavery out of Federal territory above this line and admit slavery below it. Missouri itself, although north of the line, was admitted as a slave State as part of the compromise.

The South was satisfied. So was the North and the West.

Then it happened that an Army doctor moved out of Missouri into free territory, and took Dred Scott, his body-slave, with him. The law said that a slave became free if his master took him voluntarily from slave territory.

Chief Justice Taney came from Maryland. He was very old, had a high forehead, deep-set hollow eyes, a long, thin nose, and long, thin hands. He never saw Dred Scott; Dred was as much an abstraction to him as "The Schecter Boys" were, and still are, to the present judges in the NRA case. But Dred involved millions then, as the Schecters do now. The lands of the West and the hundreds of thousands of struggling farmers were also abstractions—the Court never saw the people or the lands, any more than judges today bother about problems of the land, its conservation, or the persons called farmers.

Taney listened to the lawyers argue the case. And he and five other justices decided that the Government had no power to compromise the slavery question. Further, that slaves were slaves, and wherever you took them in Federal territory they stayed slaves.

This meant that the whole compromise of 1820, under which the country had operated so long, simply did not exist. Slave-owners could take slaves into the territory north of 36° 30', and make a slave State of a section of it.

Chief Justice Taney could have found, had he cared to investigate, good reason to know that the settling of slave-holders and free farmers in the same territory would not work. Congress had tried that policy in the Kansas-Nebraska territory. The result had been bloodshed and guerrilla warfare, with men on both sides being murdered in their beds. But by his decision Taney condemned the whole western territory to just that condition of guerrilla warfare and bloodshed.

The western farmers simply could not permit their country to be overrun with slaves and slave-owners. They found a robust leader in Abraham Lincoln, who denounced the decision as "polictical heresy," and brought the North into the Republican Party.

Compromise was "unconstitutional," so compromise was abandoned.

The day after election in 1860 there was a Republican North facing a Democratic South, and the union fell apart. It was just four years from the Dred Scott decision until the guns boomed at Fort Sumter.

What, you say, has all this to do with modern conditions?

The answer is, Everything. For indeed the same attitude, the same feeling in the Court that it can decide from its lofty and isolated perch what is going to happen to humanity, still exists in its mind today. A few can see the inevitable forces, but only a very few.

Our country faces, from a judicial viewpoint, a situation similar to, but even more dangerous than, that in the period just preceding the Civil War. The Dred Scott Decision was understood by most Americans; but the dozens of complicated decisions which the Court is now handing down make our future wholly uncertain and unpredictable.

Judge Taney, who made the great blunder of American history, was not personally a villain. Like the judges today, he thought he could sit on the High Bench, step out of his role as judge, and, as a citizen, mold the destiny of the nation through his personal prejudices. He probably never knew he was a prejudiced old man helping to lead hundreds of thousands of young men to war. And as I have shown, he did not have to pass on the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise any more than the judges who go out of their way now to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional.

He was not called upon, he did not have to say, and should not have said, anything about the free territory, nor the extension of slavery into the free territory.

It was none of his business.

Nor did he have to deprive Negroes of their American citizenship in the free States. In spite of all this he proceeded, from the Bench, to lay restrictions upon the United States Government, thereby committing the most tragic mistake of blood and death made by a judge up until that time.

The Dred Scott decision made compromise impossible. It made adjustment impossible. For indeed when Taney spoke, just as when a judge speaks today to destroy a law, hope of compromise or adjustment disappeared.

Sessions of the Court, private sayings of the judges, their written legal opinions, indicate that the situation cannot be left to handle itself. Something must be done. Since the judges examine us quite closely, let us enter the Court, quietly and respectfully, and examine them.