We believe as much as Judge Douglas (perhaps more) in obedience to and respect for the judicial department of government.  We think its decisions on constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution, as provided in that instrument itself.  More than this would be revolution.  But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous.  We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this.  We offer no resistance to it.

Judicial decisions are of greater or less authority as precedents according to circumstances.  That this should be so, accords both with common-sense and the customary understanding of the legal profession.

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on assumed historical facts, which are not really true; or if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and reaffirmed through a course of years,—­it then might be, perhaps would be factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to acquiesce in it as a precedent.

But when, as is true, we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.

I have said in substance, that the Dred Scott decision was in part based on assumed historical facts which were not really true, and I ought not to leave the subject without giving some reasons for saying this, I therefore give an instance or two, which I think fully sustain me.  Chief Justice Taney, in delivering the opinion of the majority of the court, insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States.

On the contrary, Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in five of the then thirteen States—­to wit, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina—­free negroes were voters, and in proportion to their numbers had the same part in making the Constitution that the white people had.  He shows this with so much particularity as to leave no doubt of its truth; and as a sort of conclusion on that point, holds the following language: