Page:A Historic Judicial Controversy and Some Reflections (Gregory, 1913).djvu/15

Rh his party in this great controversy. It also is worthy of comment that the judge who wrote the opinion demolishing these extreme pretensions was of the same party; the party in which state sovereignty was one of the popular battle cries. Yet in that opinion Taney made a vigorous assertion of national power which would have done credit to John Marshall. But Smith was from a free state; Taney from a slave state.

This controversy was, after all, an incident in that great struggle for human freedom which then engaged the nation, and which, after the widest discussion in the forum, in legislative halls, on the platform and before the people, could only be settled by the sword. Already the dark clouds of civil discord were lowering over our devoted land. At last the storm broke; and our country paid in the awful toll of death and suffering, in the loss, not merely of countless treasure, but of her best and bravest. North and South, the fearful penalty of a nation's sin.

Well do I remember those stirring times now fast receding into the comparative twilight of history. Yet they endure in the vivid light of reality in the memory of those who lived through them. And as we recall the awful burdens of death, of desolation and suffering by which this nation expiated her great sin, almost unpardonable, one commanding figure rises before us, and we hear again the mournful cadence of his voice as, so soon to fall a martyr in the cause to which his life was consecrated, he uttered these simple yet majestic words:—

""If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives, both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue till all the wealth, piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'.""

But government by the people was not to perish from the earth. The mighty scourge passed away; and there emerged from this