Page:A legal review of the case of Dred Scott, as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.djvu/62

 and equality of the different States supposes that each can. of its own will, according to its own judgment, exclude slavery, with as little cause of offence to any of the other States, as if its decision was in favor of admitting it. As citizens of a slaveholding State, we have no right to complain of our neighbors of Illinois, because they introduce into their State Constitution a prohibition of slavery; nor has any citizen of Missouri, who removes with his slave to Illinois, a right to complain that the fundamental law of the State to which he removes, and in which he makes his residence, dissolves the relation between him and his slave. It is as much his voluntary act, as if he had executed a deed of emancipation. Nor can any man pretend ignorance, that such is the design and effect of the constitutional provision. The decisions which have heretofore been made in this State, and in many other slaveholding States, give effect to this and other similar provisions, on the ground that the master, by making the free State the residence of his slave, has voluntarily subjected himself and property to a law. the operation of which he was bound to know It would seem difficult to make any sound distinction between the effect of an emancipation produced by the act of the master, in thus voluntarily placing his slave under the operation of such a law, and that of an emancipation produced by the act of the master, by the execution of an instrument of writing in any State where the slave resided, which, according to the law of that State, would be sufficient to discharge the slave from servitude, although it might not be a valid emancipation under the laws of another State.

"While I merely glance at the reasons which might be urged in support of the present plaintiff's claim to freedom, if it were an original question, I do not propose to rest my dissent from the opinion given in this case, upon the original reasoning in support of the position. I regard the question as conclusively settled, by repeated adjudications of this court, and if I doubted or denied the propriety of those decisions, I would not feel myself any more at liberty to overturn them, than I would any other series of decisions, by which the law upon any other question was settled. There is, with me, nothing in the law relating to slavery, which distinguishes it from the law on any other subject, or allows any more accommodation to the temporary public excitements which are gathered around it." "In the midst of all such excitement, it is proper that the judicial mind, calm and self-balanced, should adhere to principles established when there was no feeling to disturb the view of the legal questions upon which the rights of parties depend. In this State, it has been recognized, from the beginning of the government, as a correct position in law, that a master who takes his slave to reside in a State or Territory where slavery is prohibited, thereby emancipates his slave. Winney v. Whitesides, 1 Mo. Rep. 473; LeGrange v. Chouteau, 2 Mo. Rep. 20; Milley v. Smith, Ibid. 36; Ralph v. Duncan, 3 Mo. Rep. 194; Julia v. McKinnney, Ibid. 270; Natt v. Ruddle, Ibid. 400; Rachael v. Walker, 4 Mo. Rep. 350; Wilson v. Melvin, Ibid. 592. These decisions, which come down to the year 1837, seem to have so fully settled the question, that since that time there has been no case bringing it before the court for any reconsideration until the present." "The cases here referred to are cases decided when the public mind was tranquil, and when the tribunals maintained in their decisions the principles which had always received the approbation of an enlightened pubic opinion. Times may have changed, public opinion may have changed, but principles have not and do not change; and, in my judgment, there can be no safe basis for judicial decisions, but in those principles, which are immutable." 15 Missouri, 588–592.