Page:A legal review of the case of Dred Scott, as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.djvu/59

 that decision in a matter, the exclusive determination of which belongs to the State. And the condition of the plaintiff's wife and children was not in issue in this case, for the judgment against the plaintiff was founded upon his personal disability to maintain any action, and on that alone.

We cannot bring this article to a close without saying a word of the opinions of the two dissenting judges, which are certainly entitled to at least as much weight, on any point not directly adjudged by the court, as any of the opinions of the majority. Indeed, as they passed upon no point not necessary to the conclusion at which they thought the court should arrive, they may perhaps be considered as of more judicial authority. Of Mr. Justice McLean it is enough to say that his opinion is worthy of the only surviving associate of Marshall, Washington, Story, and Thompson, and of the judge whose circuit includes the territory consecrated to freedom by the Ordinance of 1787. The opinion of Mr. Justice Curtis is, by the common consent of the profession and of the public, the strongest and clearest, as well as the most thorough and elaborate of all the opinions delivered in this case, and fitly closes with the following admirable definition of judicial duty: "I have touched no question which, in the view I have taken, it was not absolutely necessary for me to pass upon, to ascertain whether the judgment of the circuit court should stand or be reversed. I have avoided no question on which the validity of that judgment depends. To have done either more or less, would have been inconsistent with my views of my duty."

We have thus examined the four points commonly supposed to have been decided in the case, and shown, so far as we were able, that the court have not, and could not have, consistently with sound principles, decided that a free negro could not be a citizen of the United States; nor that congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the Territories; nor that a master might hold his slave in any free State; nor that the slave, by returning with his master, would necessarily become a slave again. We have also stated the reasons which have led us to acquiesce in the result at which the majority of the court arrived upon the only point necessary to the decision of the case, namely, that the condition of the plaintiff, being now an inhabitant of Missouri, must be conclusively determined by the law of that State, as declared by its supreme court. How far we have succeeded in our undertaking, our readers must decide.