The effect of such a precedent on constitutional principles was certain to be great. A government competent to interpret its own powers so liberally in one instance, could hardly resist any strong temptation to do so in others. The doctrines of “strict construction” could not be considered as the doctrines of the government after they had been abandoned in this leading case by a government controlled by strict constructionists. The time came at last when the opponents of centralization were obliged to review their acts and to discover the source of their mistakes. In 1856 the Supreme Court was again required to pronounce an opinion, and found itself confronted by the legislation of 1803–1804 and the decision of Chief-Justice Marshall in 1828. Chief-Justice Taney and his associates, in the case of Dred Scott, then reviewed the acts of Jefferson and his friends in 1803–1804, and pronounced upon them the final judgment of the State-rights school. Chief-Justice Taney affirmed the right of the government to buy Louisiana and to govern it, but not to govern it as a part of the old territory over which the Constitution gave Congress unlimited power. Louisiana was governed, according to Marshall’s dictum, by a power which was “the inevitable consequence of the right to acquire territory,”--a power limited by the general purposes of the Constitution, and therefore not extending to a colonial system like that of Europe. Territory might thus be acquired; but it was acquired in order to become a State, and not to be held as a colony and governed by Congress with absolute authority; citizens who migrated to it “cannot be ruled as mere colonists dependent upon the will of the general government, and to be governed by any laws it may think proper to impose.” The chief-justice dwelt on this point at much length; the federal government, he said, “cannot, when it enters a territory of the United States, put off its character and assume discretionary or despotic powers which the Constitution has denied it.” Even this emphatic opinion, which implied that all the Louisiana legislation was unconstitutional, did not satisfy Justice Campbell, a Georgian, who represented the ultimate convictions of the strict constructionists. Campbell reviewed the national history in search of evidence “that a consolidated power had been inaugurated, whose subject comprehended an empire, and which had no restriction but the discretion of Congress.” He held that the Constitution had been plainly and repeatedly violated; “and in reference to the precedent of 1804, the wisest statesmen protested against it, and the President more than doubted its policy and the power of the government.” The Court, he said, could not undertake to conquer their scruples as the President and Congress had done. “They acknowledge that our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution, and they cannot make it blank paper by construction.”