How did the decision in the Dred Scott case affect the land and the people of the United States?

It opened every inch of land in the country to slavery. and it declared that neither the people nor any part of them could forbid slavery. It made the entire national domain, original and acquired, slave soil and it took away from the people, or any of them, any right which they had believed to be in themselves to limit or to prohibit slavery. It made, or attempted to make, the United States a slaveholding republic forever.

The power of slavocracy could, seemingly, go no further. By the Kansas-Nebraska Bill slavocracy had acquired an ample slave area on a contingency and now the Supreme Court had swept away the peril of the contingency. What though the North contained a population larger by millions than that of the South? Mere population should henceforth be powerless to limit slavery, or even to interfere with it. By the decision all the land in the United States became slave soil and none of the people of the United States could prohibit slavery.

Passing for the present the question of the expediency of this decision, or of its rightful character when that character is tested by the principles of government in America, and admitting-as every man must admit who familiarizes himself with the general trend of earlier decisions, both in State and Federal Courts; with the laws both of the States and of the United States, and with the constitutions of twenty-seven of the thirty-one States in the Union at the time the decision was handed down-that laws, decisions and constitutions were in the aggregate hostile to the thought of the negro as capable of becoming a citizen, the conclusion is justifiable that whether the Supreme Court was wise or unwise in its decision in the Dred Scott case, that decision conformed to the great body of organic law and of judicial decisions of record in 1857, touching the negro race in America. The Court might have simply dismissed the case, remanding it to the Missouri Courts for decision, and the

substance of the Court's decision, so far as Dred Scott was concerned, was to declare that it had no jurisdiction in the case. Chief Justice Taney's elaborate opinion was almost wholly a dictum, as was that, largely, of his colleagues. It was not so much the strictly judicial decision as affecting Dred Scott that interested either South or North, but the enunciation of a political doctrine by which the whole power of the United States was marshalled and henceforth to be marshalled in defense of slavery.

The confusion of politics and law by the Court, over an issue of such portentous magnitude as slavery gave a character to the decision such as no other handed down by the Court before or since has borne. By this decision the South believed that it had attained an invulnerable position: slavery was beyond any constitutional sanction; it could not be limited or hindered; it was given a national character. The entire national domain was now potentially slave soil. The people hostile to slavery were eliminated from lawful hostility toward it. And who were the people of the United States at this time? The census of 1860 discloses their number: nineteen millions (19,128,418) living in free States; twelve millions (12,315,372) living in slave States; an aggregate of over thirty-one millions, of whom nearly four millions (3,950,531) were slaves, and almost half a million (476,536) were free persons of color.

Had the nineteen millions who inhabited the free States been as united in opinion against slavery as the twelve millions who inhabited the slave States were united for it, it may safely be asserted that when the Supreme Court dismissed the Dred Scott case for lack of jurisdiction, the Chief Justice, delivering the opinion of the Court would not have added his elaborate and famous dictum on the status of the negro and of slavery in the United States. It has puzzled many readers of American history to understand how such a decision could ever have been formulated by the Court. If four millions more than half the population of the United States, at the time of the decision, lived

in free States and the theory of rule by the majority-ever a dominant theory in America-applied at the time, how could the Court reasonably expect that public opinion would sustain its decision?

Another aspect of affairs prior to the Civil War is also somewhat difficult to understand. If hostility to slavery was sufficient to provoke civil war in Kansas and opposition to slavery in Kansas was born in the free States to the east, why was it that hostility to slavery in these free States of the east was less pronounced and active than in Kansas?

And yet another inquiry: Why was the South so devoted to slavery and so tenacious in her demands for its safety and protection? The answer to this question involves an examination of the causes which led the South to adhere to her opinions of slavery and to demand national and State protection of the institution. The examination leads us to study the climate of the United States.

The two English migrations to America in the seventeenth century resulted almost at the same time in the founding of a group of colonies north and another south of a line which would divide the country into a northern and a southern zone. The aristocratic character of the leading families that settled at the South displayed itself from the beginning. African slavery, introduced into Virginia in 1619, was a long time in establishing itself over the whole South, but a short time in finding favor with the white race. A subtropical climate makes it possible to raise the cotton plant as far north as the latitude of Baltimore, but the isothermal of sixty degrees which crosses the mouth of Chesapeake Bay follows a sinuous line westward, dropping in western Virginia below the foothills of the Tennessee Mountains, bounding the Carolinas and Georgia on their west and north and crossing the Mississippi near the southern boundary of Missouri. Extending westward yet further, the cotton belt line disappears in northern Texas. Excepting the Border States, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee and Missouri, the former slaveholding States are

chiefly within the climatic cotton belt. Not that the raising of cotton was profitable over all this climatic belt; in the northern portion of the belt it was not so profitable as that of other crops. The entire slaveholding area may be said to have enjoyed a subtropical climate-and portions of slave States which had a colder climate did not abound in slaves. The elevated or mountainous portions of Kentucky and Tennessee, and of Virginia which ultimately became West Virginia did not have a populous slave element; wherever the climate of the South approximated that of the North slavery was quite unprofitable and in some regions quite unknown. The South enjoys a regular rainfall, abundant and timely. The Eastern States of the North are for a long period of the year closed in by frost and snow, overhung by a murky sky and swept over by piercing winds. The Eastern States of the South know only mild winters, gleam beneath a sunny sky and luxuriate in a tropical or subtropical vegetation. At the South cotton, sugar-cane, tobacco, maize and the cereal grains attain a wonderful state of perfection-although maize is less productive than above the latitude of forty-one degrees. The mean annual temperature of Maine is forty-two degrees; of Florida, seventyfive degrees; of New Jersey, fifty-one degrees; of Nebraska, forty-seven degrees. A climatic map of the United States therefore shows at a glance the natural division of the country east and west into a temperate, even cold North and a temperate, even tropical South. If we follow the world around we discover that these two zones of climate exist as it were by continuation across Europe and Asia. In the colder zone, in which the mean annual temperature is below fifty degrees, lie the free States; in the warmer zone whose mean annual temperature is above sixty degrees, lie the former slave States. Kansas and Nebraska lie at the meeting line of the two zones, and have a climate which is neither distinctively northern nor distinctively southern.

Throughout the history of the world the African negro has never selected the cold zone for residence and when he

has been forced to reside in it he has either succumbed to its climate, or, by artificial means, by dress or selection of occupation, created an artificial climate, just as men of other races have done when taking residence in a land whose climate was injurious to them. But the negro thrives in the climate of the South. The whites of the South discovered, or believed that they discovered, at an early day, that the negro was the only laborer capable of enduring the climate of the South. He was not looked upon by his master as a highly profitable laborer: his master believed that he was naturally a lazy, thriftless creature, quite incapable of laboring profitably for any one, even himself, unless under the direction of another. Contrasted with his condition in his native Africa, his condition at the South, so it was believed, was incomparably superior. No negro in Africa could have the comforts, the care that the slave received at the South. As to the negro, Southern men thought alike. But even this homogeneity of thought was one of the effects of climate, as the opposite opinion respecting the negro was the effect of climate at the North. The very mildness of the southern climate intensified the opinion of the South respecting the negro. By the northern standard, the white men of the South were indolent, for the northern man lived an active industrial life. By the southern standard the white man of the North was over-active, ultra-commercial, unnecessarily given to money-making and hopelessly compelled to industry. The southern gentleman was a man of leisure, highly cultured, surrounded with luxuries and comforts and free to devote himself to politics or to the general direction of his plantation. But the northern man was compelled to be industrious, whence his regular habits, his rigorous opinions, his moral ideas. The southern man was served by his slaves, he felt no pressure or compulsion for subsistence; his habits were less regular. The northern man was compelled to cease, in a measure, from labor, during the weary winter months, during which he easily gave himself to reflection and to the elaboration of his plans; the southern