"[206]
Thus we find the Supreme Court sustaining the proposition that the
Federal Government has power to establish a temporary civil government
within the limits of a Territory, but that it can enact no law which
will endure beyond the temporary purposes for which such government was
established. In other cases the decisions of the Court run in the same
line; and in 1855 the then Attorney-General, most learned in his
profession--and in what else is he not learned, for he may be said to be
a man of universal acquirements?--Attorney-General Cushing then foretold
what must have been the decision of the Supreme Court on the Missouri
Compromise, anticipating the decision subsequently made in the case of
Dred Scott; that decision for which the venerable justices have been so
often and so violently arraigned. He foretold it as the necessary
consequence from the line of precedents descending from 1842, affirmed
and reaffirmed in different cases, and now bearing on a case similar in
principle, and only different in the mere reference to the subject
involved from those which had gone before. As connected with the
decision which had agitated the peace of the country; as the
anticipation of that decision before it was made, viewing it as the
necessary consequence of the decisions which the court had made before;
if it be the pleasure of the Senate, I ask my friend from South Carolina
[Mr. Chesnut] to read for me a letter of the Attorney-General, being an
official answer made by him in relation to the military reservation
which was involved in the question before him.
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