The constitutional point, as far as I can see, is that slaves were legally property and so the owners' rights were as absolutely protected as the rights to their horses (maybe even more so, since states were explicitly constitutionally required to return runaway slaves to their owners). Taney's racist obiter dicta at least served
the very useful purpose of making the inevitable Civil War imminent.
Shane Mage
^^^^ CB: That seems correct to me. But it doesn't follow from that that Whites don't have to respect the rights of Blacks who are not slaves. Nor that Congress can't declare slavery illegal in a territory. Slavery was illegal in lots of states under that same Constitution.
As to the Civil War, maybe it would have come sooner if the Supreme Court had ruled the other way, for iit was Lincoln's declaring he would not allow slavery to expand beyond the states where it existed that caused the South to start the war. Civil War was a counter-revolutionary thrust by the slavocracy, which had been the ruling class of the US until then.