With Malice Toward None: A Biography of Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

Each judge wrote a separate opinion in the controversial case, but Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland, a gaunt Democrat and former slave owner, authored the one most often cited. The other six Democratic judges concurred with Taney, but the two Republicans vigorously dissented. First, Taney declared that free Negroes were not and never had been U.S. citizens, that the Constitution and the language of the Declaration of Independence did not embrace them as part of the American “people.” At the time these documents were framed, Taney argued, Negroes were regarded as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” As a consequence, the Declaration itself was a white man’s document which had never applied to blacks.

The Deed Scott decision.