The public sentiment regarding it immediately divided, generally on existing party lines—­the South and the Democrats accepting and commending, the North and the Republicans spurning and condemning it.  The great anti-slavery public was not slow in making a practical application of its dogmas:  that a sweeping and revolutionary exposition of the Constitution had been attempted when confessedly the case and question had no right to be in court; that an evident partisan dictum of national judges had been built on an avowed partisan decision of State judges; that both the legislative and judicial authority of the nation had been trifled with; that the settler’s “sovereignty” in Kansas consisted only of a Southern planter’s right to bring his slaves there; and that if under the “property” theory the Constitution carries slavery to the Territories, it would by the same inevitable logic carry it into free-States.

But much more offensive to the Northern mind than his conclusions of law were the language and historical assertions by which Chief-Justice Taney strove to justify them.

  [Sidenote] 19 Howard, p. 407.

In the opinion of the court [said he] the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.  It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted.  But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.  They had for more than a century before been 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; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.  He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.

Quoting the provisions of several early slave codes, he continued: 

  [Sidenote] Ibid., p. 409.

They show that a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery and governed as subjects with absolute and despotic power, and which they then looked upon as so far below them in the scale of created beings that intermarriages between white persons and negroes or mulattoes were regarded as unnatural and immoral, and punished as crimes, not only in the parties, but in the person who joined them in marriage.  And no distinction in this respect was made between the free negro or mulatto and the slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation, was fixed upon the whole race.

Referring to the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, which asserts that all men are created equal, he remarked: