Judge 666 According to the laws of this State,' says Judge Gaston, in deGaston cited. livering the opinion of the court, 'all human beings within it, who are not slaves, fall within one of two classes. Whatever distinctions may have existed in the Roman laws between citizens and free inhabitants, they are unknown to our institutions. Before our Revolution, all free persons born within the dominions of the King of Great Britain, whatever their color or complexion, were native-born British subjects, those born out of his allegiance were aliens. Slavery did not exist in England, but it did in the British colonies. Slaves were not in legal parlance persons, but property. The moment the incapacity, the disqualification of slavery, was removed, they became persons; and were then either British subjects, or not British subjects, according as they were or were not born within the allegiance of the British King. Upon the Revolution, no other change took place in the laws of North Carolina than was consequent on the transition from a colony dependent on a European King, to a free and sovereign State. Slaves remained slaves. British subjects in North Carolina became North Carolina freemen. Foreigners, until made members of the State, remained aliens. Slaves, manumitted here, became freemen; and therefore, if born within North Carolina, are citizens of North Carolina; and all free persons born within the State are born citizens of the State. The Constitution extended the elective franchise to every freeman who had arrived at the age of twenty-one, and paid a public tax; and it is a matter of universal notoriety, that, under it, free persons, without regard to color, claimed and exercised the franchise, until it was taken from free men of color a few years since by our amended Constitution.' Judge Curtis. "It has been often asserted, that the Constitution was made exclusively by and for the white race. It has already been shown, that, in five of the thirteen original States, colored persons then possessed the elective franchise, and were among those by whom the Constitution was ordained and established. If so, it is not true, in point of fact, that the Constitution was made exclusively by the white race. And that it was made exclusively for the white race is, in my opinion, not only an assumption not warranted by any thing in the Constitution, but contradicted by its opening declaration, that it was ordained and established by the people of the United States, for themselves and their posterity. And, as free colored persons were then citizens of at least five States, and so in every sense part of the people of the United States, they were among those for whom and whose posterity the Constitution was ordained and established.". - Howard's Reports, vol. xix. pp. 572, 573, 582. The Hon. George Bancroft, in his "Oration before the Mayor, Common Council, and Citizens of New York, on the 22d of February, 1862," alluding to the opinion of Judge Taney, notwithstanding his affinities with the political party through which the Chief-Justice was raised to his high station, thus speaks: Bancroft. "During all these convulsions, the United States stood unchanged, George admitting none but the slightest modifications in its charter, and proving itself the most stable government of the civilized world. But at last we have fallen on evil days.' The propitious smiles of Heaven,' such are the words of Washington, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right.' During eleven years of perverse government, those rules were disregarded; and it came to pass that men who should firmly avow the sentiments of Washington, and Jefferson, and Franklin, and Chancellor Livingston, were disfranchised for the public service; that the spotless ChiefJustice whom Washington placed at the head of our Supreme Court could by no possibility have been nominated for that office, or confirmed. Nay, the corrupt influence invaded even the very home of justice. The final decree of the Supreme Court, in its decision on a particular case, must be respected and obeyed: the present Chief-Justice has, on one memorable appeal, accompanied his decision with an impassioned declamation, wherein, with profound immorality, which no one has as yet fully laid bare, treating the people of the United States as a shrew to be tamed by an open scorn of the facts of history, with a dreary industry collecting cases where justice may have slumbered or weakness been oppressed, compensating for want of evidence by confidence of assertion, with a partiality that would have disgraced an advocate neglecting humane decisions of colonial courts and the enduring memorials of colonial statute-books, in his party zeal to prove that the fathers of our country held the negro to have no rights which the white man was bound to respect,' he has not only denied the rights of man and the liberties of mankind, but has not left a foothold for the liberty of the white man to rest upon. "That ill-starred disquisition is the starting-point of this rebellion, Bancroft. we George which, for a quarter of a century, had been vainly preparing to raise its head. 'When courts of justice fail, war begins.' The so-called opinion of Taney, who, I trust, did not intend to hang out the flag of disunion, that rash offence to the conscious memory of the millions, upheaved our country with the excitement which swept over those of us who vainly hoped to preserve a strong and sufficient though narrow isthmus that might stand between the conflicting floods. No nation can adopt that judgment as its rule, and live: the judgment has in it no element of political vitality. I will not say it is an invocation of the dead past there never was a past that accepted such opinions. If w want the opinions received in the days when our Constitution was framed, we will not take them second-hand from our Chief-Justice: we will let the men of that day speak for themselves. How will our American magistrate sink, when arraigned, as he will be, before the tribunal of humanity! How terrible will be the verdict against him, when he is put in comparison with Washington's political teacher, the great Montesquieu, the enlightened magistrate of France, in what are esteemed the worst days of her monarchy! The argument from the difference of race which Taney thrusts forward with passionate confidence, as a proof of complete disqualification, is brought forward by Montesquieu as a scathing satire on all the brood of despots who were supposed to uphold slavery as tolerable in itself. The rights of MANKIND that precious word which had no equivalent in the language of Hindostan, or Judæa, or Greece, or Rome, or any ante-Christian tongue found their supporter in Washington and Hamilton, in Franklin and Livingston, in Otis, George Mason, and Gadsden; in all the greatest men of our early history. The one rule from which the makers of our first Confederacy, and then of our national Constitution, never swerved, is this: to fix no constitutional disability on any one. Whatever might stand in the way of any man, from opinion, ancestry, weakness of mind, inferiority or inconvenience of any kind, was itself not formed into a permanent disfranchisement. The Constitution of the United States was made under the recognized influence of the eternal rule of order and right'; so that, as far as its jurisdiction extends, it raised at once the numerous class who had been chattels into the condition of persons: it neither originates nor perpetuates inequality." - Pulpit and Rostrum, 1862, pp. 104-107. -- In refutation of the common charge, that the North has changed its position on the subject of slavery, I cannot for bear adding an extract from the "Address of the Hon. Edward Everett, delivered in New York, on the 4th of July, 1861." In his own matchless manner, Mr. Everett thus disposes of the whole matter: Everett. "The Southern theory assumes, that, at the time of the adoption Edward of the Constitution, the same antagonism prevailed as now between the North and South, on the general subject of slavery; that although it existed, to some extent, in all the States but one of the Union, it was a feeble and declining interest at the North, and mainly seated at the South; that the soil and climate of the North were soon found to be unpropitious to slave labor, while the reverse was the case at the South; that the Northern States, in consequence, having from interested motives abolished slavery, sold their slaves to the South; and that then, although the existence of slavery was recognized, and its protection guarantied, by the Constitution, as soon as the Northern States had acquired a controlling voice in Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated, and gradually extended, in violation of the compromises of the Constitution, as well as of the honor and good faith tacitly pledged to the South by the manner in which the North disposed of her slaves. "Such, in substance, is the statement of Mr. Davis, in his late message; and he then proceeds, seemingly as if rehearsing the acts of this Northern majority in Congress, to refer to the anti-slavery measures of the State Legislatures, to the resolutions of abolition societies, to the passionate appeals of the party press, and to the acts of lawless individuals, during the progress of this unhappy agitation. "Now, this entire view of the subject, with whatever boldness it is affirmed, and with whatever persistency it is repeated, is destitute of foundation. It is demonstrably at war with the truth of history, and is contradicted by facts known to those now on the stage, or which are matters of recent record. At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and long afterwards, there was, generally speaking, no sectional difference of opinion between North and South on the subject of slavery. It was in both parts of the country regarded, in the established formula of the day, as a social, political, and moral evil.' The general feeling in favor of universal liberty and the rights of man, wrought into fervor in the progress of the Revolution, naturally strengthened the anti-slavery sentiment throughout the Union. It is 6 Edward the South which has since changed, not the North. The theory of a Everett. change in the Northern mind, growing out of a discovery made soon after 1789, that our soil and climate were unpropitious to slavery (as if the soil and climate then were different from what they had always been), and a consequent sale to the South of the slaves of the North, is purely mythical, -as groundless in fact as it is absurd in statement. I have often asked for the evidence of this last allegation, and I have never found an individual who attempted even to prove it. But however this may be, the South at that time regarded slavery as an evil, though a necessary one, and habitually spoke of it in that light. Its continued existence was supposed to depend on keeping up the African slave-trade; and South as well as North, Virginia as well as Massachusetts, passed laws to prohibit that traffic: they were, however, before the Revolution, vetoed by the Royal Governors. One of the first acts of the Continental Congress, unanimously subscribed by its members, was an agreement neither to import, nor purchase any slave imported, after the first of December, 1774. In the Declaration of Independence, as originally draughted by Mr. Jefferson, both slavery and the slave-trade were denounced in the most uncompromising language. In 1777, the traffic was forbidden in Virginia, by State law, no longer subject to the veto of Royal Governors. In 1784, an ordinance was reported by Mr. Jefferson to the old Congress, providing that after 1800 there should be no slavery in any Territory ceded or to be ceded to the United States. The ordinance failed at that time to be enacted; but the same prohibition formed a part, by general consent, of the ordinance of 1787 for the organization of the North-western Territory. In his 'Notes on Virginia,' published in that year, Mr. Jefferson depicted the evils of slavery in terms of fearful import. In the same year, the Constitution was framed. It recognized the existence of slavery; but the word was carefully excluded from the instrument, and Congress was authorized to abolish the traffic in twenty years. In 1796, Mr. St. George Tucker, law-professor in William and Mary College, in Virginia, published a treatise entitled 'A Dissertation on Slavery, with a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it in the State of Virginia.' In the preface to the essay, he speaks of the abolition of slavery in this State as an object of the first importance, not only to our moral character and domestic peace, but even to our political salvation.' In 1797, Mr. Pinkney, in the Legislature of Maryland, maintained, that, 'by the eternal principles of justice, no man in the State has a right |