agent for a Maryland slave-holder, had seized and carried back to her master an escaped female slave, for which he was indicted under a state law, which made it a penal act to carry a negro or mulatto by force out of the state. Justice Story delivered the opinion, which declared the law unconstitutional because the remedy for fugitives from labor is vested exclusively in congress. Chief-Justice Taney held, however, that states could pass laws for the rendition of escaped servants, but not to impair the right of the master to seize his fugitive slave, which he declared to be the law of each state. He concurred with Justice Story and Justice John McLean, and protected the rights of the Federal government in the Holmes habeas corpus case, in which he denied the authority of the governor of Vermont to extradite a fugitive from justice, because all foreign intercourse belongs to the Federal government. In 1847 the court decided, in the Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire license cases, that a state can regulate or prohibit the retail sale of wines or spirits that congress has authorized to be imported. In the Massachusetts and New York passenger cases the chief justice delivered an opinion that the state authorities could impose a head-tax on immigrants, on the grounds that the power of congress to regu- late commerce is not exclusive, and that persons are not subjects of commerce. In 1849 he declined to pronounce judgment as to which of the contending governments of Rhode Island was the legitimate one, as it belonged to the political and not to the judicial department of the government to determine that question. In 1845 he upheld the constitutionality of the law of congress that extended admiralty jurisdiction over the lakes and connecting navigable waters, although English precedents limited it to tide-water.
In the midst of the excitement that attended the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill (30 May, 1854), and the strife of free-soilers and slave-holders, the Dred Scott case, to which President Buchanan alluded in his inaugural message, came before the supreme court for decision. It involved the question whether congress had the power to exclude slavery from the territories. The case was presented in 1854, and, after being twice argued, was finally decided in 1857. The opinion of the court was written by Chief-Justice Taney, who entered into an elaborate historical exposition of the status of the negro, the other five judges who concurred in the decision delivering separate opinions. He held that the plaintiff in error, Dred Scott, was debarred from seeking a remedy in the U. S. circuit court for Missouri, on the ground that he was not a citizen of that state, and enunciated the general principle that negroes could not become citizens by the act of any state or of the United States, since, before the adoption of the constitution, the colonies had special laws for colored people, whether slave or free, and congress had not authorized their naturalization or enrolled them in the militia. “They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” He held, further, that the Missouri compromise and other laws of congress inhibiting slavery in the territories of the United States were unconstitutional, and that whatever measure of freedom Dred Scott may have acquired by his residence in Illinois, he lost by being subsequently removed into the territory of Wisconsin, and by his return thence to Missouri. This deliverance, made two days after the inauguration of President Buchanan, produced intense excitement throughout the country and a strong reaction in favor of the anti-slavery party. The chief justice replied to the strictures that it provoked, and especially to a direct attack on the supreme court made by William H. Seward in the senate, in a supplementary opinion explaining and justifying his legal deductions. In the following year a case that arose under the fugitive-slave law of 1850 came before Chief-Justice Taney. Sherman M. Booth, who had been sentenced by the U. S. district court for aiding in the escape of a negro from slavery, was released on habeas corpus proceedings by the supreme court of Wisconsin, which refused to take cognizance of the subsequent mandates of the supreme court of the United States in the matter. In reviewing the case Chief-Justice Taney affirmed the constitutionality of the fugitive-slave law, and declared that “so long as this constitution shall endure, this tribunal must exist with it, deciding in the peaceful forms of judicial procedure the angry and irritating controversies between sovereignties which in other countries have been decided by the arbitrament of force.” The reversal of the judgment of the state court called forth a declaration of the legislature of Wisconsin that the government of the United States was not the final judge of the extent of its powers, but that the states, as parties to the compact, have an equal right to determine infractions of their rights and the mode of their redress, and that the judgment of the Federal court was “void and of no force.” The chief question at issue in the presidential election of 1860 was whether the Dred Scott decision, throwing all the territories of the United States open to slavery and denying to colored persons any standing in courts of law, should be maintained as the true construction of the constitution. On 13 March, 1861, Chief-Justice Taney delivered the opinion of the court in mandamus proceedings brought by the state of Kentucky against the governor of Ohio to compel him to cause the arrest and delivery of Willis Lago, a free man of color who, while under indictment for assisting a slave to escape, had fled from Kentucky. He affirmed the right of Kentucky to demand the person of the fugitive, and the obligation of Ohio to render him up, yet denied the jurisdiction of the U. S. court in the case.
When, after the secession of the southern states, martial law was proclaimed in Maryland, Chief-Justice Taney, on application of John Merryman, arrested by order of Gen. George Cadwalader, ordered the release of the prisoner, issued an attachment against the officer, and filed an opinion, to be laid before President Lincoln, in which he denied the right of the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, affirming that such power is vested in congress alone. When congress passed an act to withhold three per cent. of the salaries of government officers, Chief-Justice Taney, on 16 Feb., 1863, sent a letter to the secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, pointing out the unconstitutionally of this law so far as it affected the judges of the U. S. courts. In the matter of a seizure of contraband goods, he delivered on 3 June, 1863, an opinion at nisi prius, in which he censured the duplicity of the government detectives, ordered the price of the goods to be restored to the smugglers, and mulcted the provost-marshal and his assistants in damages and costs. Chief-Justice Taney died on the same day on which the state of Maryland abolished slavery. His judicial opinions
