He was discussing slaves, so I assumed that's what he meant (real property).
"There's no getting around it. The reasoning Taney applies is that the FOUNDERS considered African negros to be "a subordinate and inferior class of beings", of a race inferior to the "dominant race".
This was merely a part of his reasoning. He was ruling out the possibility that African negros could have been U.S. citizens from the get-go.
"A sad, tragic ruling."
True, as disgusting as it was, the ruling followed the law and the U.S. Constitution. Even Taney admits in the ruling, "It is not the province of the court to decide upon the justice or injustice, the policy or impolicy, of these laws. The decision of that question belonged to the political or lawmaking power, to those who formed the sovereignty and framed the Constitution."
When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.
-- Matthew 27:24
Nope. The ruling was in error, as can be easily seen by reading the two dissents.
In quite a few of the states at the time of the Constitutional Convention, free blacks were full citizens, complete with voting rights. So when the Preamble refers to "We the people of the United States," it includes those free blacks in those states. Though, to be fair, it did not include slaves or free blacks in the states that did not consider free blacks citizens.
Taney just ignores these facts and proclaims what he thinks the Founders meant, deciding quite without a shred of evidence that when they said, "We the people of the United States," they really meant "We the people of the Unites States, except of course for any people who have African ancestry."
The Founders were not idiots. Had they intended to say any such thing, they certainly could have done so. It is the height of arrogance for Taney, or anyone else, to determine decades after the fact what they really meant to say.
In essence, Taney was proclaiming a "living Constitution," one that needed to "move with the times," and keep up with modern (southern) opinion.
No it did not.
Because for his logic in Dred Scott v Sandford to follow the Law and the U.S. Constitution, Taney had to recast certain predicate as to what law and the US Constitution meant, and also what was the proper role of the Court in adjudicating them. In that last he motive he was joined by many Justices on the Supreme Court in the courts since the second one, the Marshall Court.
When Taney wrote:
The decision of that question belonged to the political or lawmaking power, to those who formed the sovereignty and framed the Constitution.He did so claiming an impossible perfection, or rather more likely a deliberate imperfection, in understanding what "those who framed the Constitution" meant. What was that? That African negros were subhuman, and because of that subhuman status not treated like the white European descendants of those who came here as slaves, for slavery for both blacks and whites in the 1600's was for a term, and not lifetime slavery.
Taney ignored too the predominant and victorious (the ones that inspired most the victory of the Revolution) natural law understandings of the colonial and founding period, that "all men are created equal", that no race was subhuman, no race was inferior to the point of being absent from the rights of the rest of men.
In other words, Taney mocked the Law, by disregarding its foundations.
And he did so with great pride in his work, an overwhelming arrogance that appears in instance as words you quoted:
It is not the province of the court to decide upon the justice or injusticeSuch disclaimer gave full reign to his wanton recasting of the Founder's intents in the Constitution regarding citizenship, and to his mocking of the foundations of natural law, the basis of our America common law.
From time immemorial the courts exist ONLY to provide for justice and to correct of limit injustice. They operate within the framing of laws, and established custom in law, but within that framework they must decide upon the justice or injustice.
When judges and courts become mere idlers, decisionless functionaries stamping out rulings according to pat formulas of law, tyranny leaps in and civil strife, civil war, follows. Judges, like Juries, are to apply facts, law and process to produce a just result.
They intercede between the mechanical crushing forces of any statute or regulation no matter how well crafted, inspired, or intentioned and the actual human reality! That is their duty.