"Every citizen has a right to take with him into the Territory any article of property which the Constitution of the United States recognizes as property. "The Constitution of the United States recognizes slaves as property, and pledges the Federal Government to protect it. And Congress cannot exercise any more authority on property of that description than it may constitutionally exercise over property of any other kind. "The act of Congress, therefore, prohibiting a citizen of the United States from taking with him his slaves when he removes to the Territory in question to reside, is an exercise of authority over private property which is not warranted by the Constitution--and the removal of the plaintiff, by his owner, to that Territory, gave him no title to freedom. "The plaintiff himself acquired no title to freedom by being taken by his owner to Rock Island, in Illinois, and brought back to Missouri. This court has heretofore decided that the status or condition of a person of African descent depended on the laws of the State in which he resided." Thus the highest and most august judicial tribunal of this country pronounced doctrines abhorrent to the age, overthrowing the acts and practices of the fathers and framers of the Republic, and pronouncing the Ordinance of 1787, in so far as it restricted human slavery, and all like enactments as, from the beginning, _unconstitutional_. This decision startled the bench and bar and the thinking people of the whole country, not alone on account of the doctrines laid down by the court, but because of the new departure of a high court in going beyond the confines of the case made on the record to announce them. It is, to say the least, only usual for any court to decide the issues necessary to a determination of the real case under consideration, nothing more; but the court in this case first decided that the Circuit Court, from which error was prosecuted, had no jurisdiction to render any judgment, it having found "upon the showing of Scott himself that he was still a slave; not even to render a judgment against him and in favor of defendants for costs." In the opinion it is said: "It is the judgment of this court that it appears by the record before us that the plaintiff in error is not a citizen of Missouri, in the same sense in which that word is used in the Constitution; and that the Circuit Court of the United States, for that reason, had _no jurisdiction_ in the case, and could give no judgment in it. Its judgment for the defendant must, consequently, be reversed, and a mandate issued, directing the suit to be dismissed for want of jurisdiction." Having thus decided, it followed that anything said or attempted to be decided on other questions was extra-judicial--mere _obiter dicta_, if even that.