This, the Supreme Court decided, was the law and reality of the American people and the law of the land known as the Constitution: that being black meant you were “an article of property.”42 Most importantly, Taney’s decision not only rang true, historically, on his point, but it revealed that the North, too, had been willing, knowing, and complicit in the peculiar institution from the beginning, and had written that same attitude organically into their Constitution.43
