The Smoky Hill and Republican union. [volume] (Junction City, Kan.) 1861-1864, 1862-04-03
Bancroft on Taney.

Bancroft on Taney.
On Washington's Birthday, Mr.. Ban
croft, the historian, made a speech in New
York.
Mr. Bancroft, it will be remembered, was
Navy Secretary in the Polk Administration.
Chief Justice fancy, in bis Dred Scott
decision, made the announcement that the
Fathers of the Republic believed that 60 me-
groes had no rights which white men were
bound to respect"
This falsihcation Of the fathers and Of the
colonial records and statutes, Mr.. Bancroft
appropriately stigmatiaes. After saving that
corrupt influences had invaded the home of
justice, the American Historian thus smoke
Of Chief Justice Taney:-
"The present Chief Justice has, on one
memorable appeal, accompanied his decision
With an impassioned defamation, wherein,
with profound Immortality which no one
has as yet fully laid bare, treating the peo.
pie Of the United States as shrew, to be-
tanned by an open scorn of the facts of his.
tory, with dreary industry collecting ev-
licences of causes where justice may have
slumbered or weakness been oppressed, COM
pensating for want of evidence by confidence
Of assertion, with partiality chat would
have disgraced an advocate, neslectius hu-
name 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 ono
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 foothold for the liberty Of the
white man to rest upon.
That i'll starred disquisition Of Taney, who
trust did not intend to hand out the Gag
of disunion, is the fountain head of this re-
bellion that ofensc to the conscious MEM
ory of the millions convulsed our country
with the excitement which swept over those
of US who vainly hoped to preserve strong
and sufficient though morrow isthmus, that
might stand between the conflicting foods.
No nation can adopt that judgment as its
rule, and live; the judgment has in it no
element Of political vitality; will not say
it is an invocation of the dead past there
never was past that accepted such opinions.
If We want the opinions received in the day
when our Constitution was framed, we will
not take them second hand from our Chief
Justice; We will let the man of that day
speak for themselves How will our Amer
ican 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 Wash
ington's political teacher, the great Montes-
puien, the enlightened magistrate of France,
in what are esteemed the worst days of her
monarchy. The arguments from the differ
ence Of race which Taney thrusts forward
with passionate confidence, as proof of COM
plete disqualification, is brought forward by
Montesquien as seathiDg satire, on all the
blood Of despots who were supposed to up
hold slavery as tolerablc in itself. The rights
of mankind, that precious word which had
no equivalent in the language Of Hindos-
tan, or Judea, or Greece, or Rome, or any
anti Christian tongue, found its supporters
in Washington and Hamilton; in Fanklin
and Livington; in Otis, George Mason and
Gadsden /; in all the greatest men of our ear
ly history. The one rule from which tho
makers of our first Confederacy, and then
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 perman-
ent disfrancisement. The Constitution of
the United States was made under the re-
coguized influence Of "the eternal rule of
order, and right" SO that, so far as its jur-
isdiction extended, it raised at once the nu-
merous classes who had been chattcls into
the condition of persons; it neither origin
ates nor perpetrates inequality.