shall hold his life, liberty, property, and immunities under general rules which govern society.'"—Webster.
"'Thank God,' he exclaimed, that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty million sterling for the abolition of slavery!'"—Wilberforce.
Before the embodiment of these mighty provisions into the Constitution by the Fourteenth Amendment, Mr. Justice Johnson, in construing the words of Magna Charta,—"No freeman ought to be taken or imprisoned," etc., "or deprived of his life, liberty, or property, but by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land,"—declared, after volumes had been spoken and written with a view to their exposition, "The good sense of mankind has at length settled down to this, that they were intended to secure the individual from the arbitrary exercise of the powers of government, unrestrained by the established principles of private right and distributive justice;" which only can be in conformity with due course of legal proceedings, according to those rules and forms established for the protection of private rights by the supreme law of the land.[1]
From an historic stand-point, the philosophic reviewer of American jurisprudence will hereafter naturally turn with profound interest to the judicial interpretation placed by the Supreme Court upon the grand provisions of this new charter of Universal Emancipation, which first made liberty in America commensurate with and inseparable from American soil. Upon a close examination of the earliest decisions of the Supreme Court, declaratory of the civil rights of American citizens of African descent (under the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment), it will become apparent, that the foregoing twelve law propositions, defining the constitutional status of the civil rights of the citizens of the United States of African descent, place them upon a more solid and substantial although a less lofty basis than do the earlier Supreme Court decisions.
The enthusiastic judges of the Supreme Court forced the tri-
- ↑ Bank of Columbia v. Oakley, 4 Wheaton, 235.
