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
streets; when Birney's printing-press in Cincinnati was being tumbled
into the Ohio River; when Pennsylvania Hall, the Quaker Abolitionists'
forty-thousand-dollar construction, was ablaze in Philadelphia; when
Lovejoy, the Abolition martyr, was bleeding out his life in one of the
streets of Alton, Illinois--when, in fact, the whole land was swayed
by a frenzied hatred of the men and women who dared to question
slavery's right to supremacy, the writer believes the movement would
have been successful.
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