Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, upon which they relied to give
them the legal power to take and hold their slaves in all parts of the
land. Up to the date of that decision, the current of judicial rulings
had been that slavery, being a municipal institution, was local,
while freedom was national. Hence, when a master took his slave into a
free State, at that instant he became a free man. The Dred Scott
decision was intended to reverse the rule. Practically it held that
slave ownership, wherever the Constitution prevailed, was both a legal
and a natural right. It, as Benton forcibly expressed it, "made
slavery the organic law of the land and freedom the exception"; or, as
it was jocularly expressed at the time, it left freedom nowhere.

Although at the time of its promulgation, it was claimed by some of
the more conservative pro-slavery leaders that the Dred Scott dictum
applied only to the Territories, giving the masters the legal
authority to enter them with their slaves, that position was clearly
deceptive. The principle involved, as laid down by the Court, was
altogether too broad for that construction. In effect it put the
proprietorship of human beings upon the same footing with other
property rights, and claimed for it the same constitutional
protection. The bolder men of the South, like Toombs of Georgia, did
not hesitate to give that interpretation to the Court's pronouncement,
and to insist on it with brutal frankness. If they were wrong, the
Court was putty in their hands and they could easily have had a
supplemental ruling that would have gone to any extent.

If the Dred Scott decision had been promulgated by our highest court,
and the slaveholders had insisted upon the license it was intended to
give them for taking their slave property into free territory, at the
time that Garrison was being dragged by a mob through Boston's