Had Chief-Justice Taney’s delineation been historically correct, it would have been nevertheless unwise and unchristian to embody it in the form of a disqualifying legal sentence and an indelible political brand.  But its manifest untruth was clearly shown by Justice Curtis in his dissenting opinion.  He reminded the Chief-Justice that at the adoption of the Constitution: 

  [Sidenote] 19 Howard, p. 582.

In five of the thirteen original States colored persons then possessed the elective franchise, and were among those by whom the Constitution was ordained and established.  If so, it is not true in point of fact that the Constitution was made exclusively by the white race, and that it was made exclusively for the white race is in my opinion not only an assumption not warranted by anything in the Constitution, but contradicted by its opening declaration that it was ordained and established by the people of the United States for themselves and their posterity; and as free colored persons were then citizens of at least five States, and so in every sense part of the people of the United States, they were among those for whom and whose posterity the Constitution was ordained and established.

Elsewhere in the same opinion he said: 

  [Sidenote] Ibid., pp. 574-5.

I shall not enter into an examination of the existing opinions of that period respecting the African race, nor into any discussion concerning the meaning of those who asserted in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  My own opinion is, that a calm comparison of these assertions of universal abstract truths, and of their own individual opinions and acts, would not leave these men under any reproach of inconsistency; that the great truths they asserted on that solemn occasion they were ready and anxious to make effectual; wherever a necessary regard to circumstances, which no statesman can disregard without producing more evil than good, would allow; and that it would not be just to them, nor true in itself, to allege that they intended to say that the Creator of all men had endowed the white race exclusively with the great natural rights which the Declaration of Independence asserts.

Justice McLean, in his dissenting opinion, completed the outline of the true historical picture in accurate language: 

  [Sidenote] 19 Howard, pp. 537-8.

I prefer the lights of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, as a means of construing the Constitution in all its bearings, rather than to look behind that period into a traffic which is now declared to be piracy, and punished with death by Christian nations.  I do not like to draw the sources of our domestic relations from so dark a ground.  Our independence was a great epoch in the history of