Five of the nine justices were from the south including Taney, a Marylander.
Grier, Pennsyvania, was staunchly pro slavery.
Benjamin Curtis, Dissent, a Massachusetts Whig who as a former state legislator had defended the Fugitive Slave Act on constitutional grounds -- and whose confirmation to the Court had been briefly held up by abolitionist opposition in the Senate -- found himself in the unlikely role of dissenter. Curtis' dissent was lengthy, offering a point-by-point rebuttal to each of Taney's assertions; it was also angry, although not out of any abolitionist zeal but rather due to his belief that Taney had used the Court to advance a distinctly political agenda. Curtis did not contest the basic distinction Taney had made between state and national citizenship. However, he held that the road to national citizenship was through state citizenship: any person deemed by any state to be its citizen was also, by definition, a citizen of the United States. In this way, a constitutional path to U.S. citizenship lay open to blacks.
Grier, Pennsyvania, was staunchly pro slavery.
Benjamin Curtis, Dissent, a Massachusetts Whig who as a former state legislator had defended the Fugitive Slave Act on constitutional grounds -- and whose confirmation to the Court had been briefly held up by abolitionist opposition in the Senate -- found himself in the unlikely role of dissenter. Curtis' dissent was lengthy, offering a point-by-point rebuttal to each of Taney's assertions; it was also angry, although not out of any abolitionist zeal but rather due to his belief that Taney had used the Court to advance a distinctly political agenda. Curtis did not contest the basic distinction Taney had made between state and national citizenship. However, he held that the road to national citizenship was through state citizenship: any person deemed by any state to be its citizen was also, by definition, a citizen of the United States. In this way, a constitutional path to U.S. citizenship lay open to blacks.
Curtis conducted an extensive historical review of statutes, case law, and demographic records and asserted that in five of the original 13 states, blacks had held citizenship at the time of the Constitution's ratification -- and that they had therefore voted and participated in the process of its ratification. It was "not true, in point of fact, that the Constitution was made exclusively by the white race," he wrote. Therefore, blacks were "in every sense part of the people of the United States [as] they were among those for whom and whose posterity the Constitution was ordained and established." Significantly, however, although Curtis saw the Constitution as providing for the possibility of black citizenship, he stopped far short of endorsing full political equality for blacks -- and, in fact, would later oppose the full extension of the rights of national citizenship to blacks offered by the Fourteenth Amendment.
McLean, in Dissent, grew up in Ohio. Going on to graduating from Harvard in 1806. It can also be argued that his anti-slavery views also began to form at this time, given his upbringing as an evangelical Methodist with a focus on egalitarianism.
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