involve an absurdity to impute to it the investiture of rights which the sovereignty alone had
power to impart. There is not, perhaps, a community in which slavery is recognized, in which
the power of emancipation, and the modes of its exercise are not regulated by law ~ that is, by
the sovereign authority; and none can fail to comprehend the necessity for such regulation, for
the preservation of order, and even of political and social existence.

By the argument for the plaintiff in error, a power equally despotic is vested in every
member of the association, and the most obscure or unworthy individual it comprises may
arbitrarily invade and derange its most deliberate and solemn ordinances. At assumptions
anomalous as these, so fraught with mischief and ruin, the mind at once is revolted, and goes
directly to the conclusions, that to change or to abolish a fundamental principle of the society,
must be the act of the society itself — of the sovereignty; and that none other can admit to a
participation of that high attribute.

3.        Dissent of Justice McLean

[Justice McLean dissented on several grounds. He argued that the issue of the circuit
court's jurisdiction was not properly before the Court; that Art. IV, § 3 cl. 2 did in fact authorize
the Missouri Compromise; and that the Court ought not to give effect to the Missouri Supreme
Court's determination of Scott's status - of all the opinions submitted in Dred Scott, however,
only McLean's expresses concern about the Court's complicity in upholding the system of
slavery. Regarding Taney's jurisprudence of original intent, he wrote:]

hi the formation of the Federal Constitution, care was taken to confer no power on the
Federal Government, to interfere with this institution in the States. In the provision respecting
the slave trade, in fixing the ratio of representation, and providing for the reclamation of fugitives
from labor, slaves were referred to as persons, and in no other respect are they considered in the
Constitution.

We need not refer to the mercenary spirit which introduced the infamous traffic in slaves,
to show the degradation of negro slavery in our country. This system was imposed upon our
colonial settlements by the mother country, and it is due to truth to say that the commercial
Colonies and States were chiefly engaged in the traffic. But we know as a historical fact, that
James Madison, that great and good man, a leading member in the Federal Convention, was
solicitous to guard the language of that instrument so as not to convey the idea that there could be
property in man.

I prefer the lights of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, as a means of construing the
Constitution in all its bearings, rather than to look behind that period, into a traffic which is now
declared to be piracy, and punished with death by Christian nations. I do not like to draw the
sources of our domestic relations from so dark a ground. Our independence was a great epoch in
the history of freedom; and while I admit the government was not made especially for the colored
race, yet many of them were citizens of the New England States, and exercised the rights of

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