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[133 part three Inescapable Opportunity The Supreme Court and the Dred Scott Case while the supreme court struggled with its southern faction over issues of corporate law, the sectional crisis reemerged in electoral politics. A few years of relative calm passed after politicians settled for the Compromise of 1850, but in 1854 Congress organized the Kansas and Nebraska Territories and allowed settlers to determine whether slavery would be permitted in their midst. Enabling settlers to exercise this “popular sovereignty” required that the Kansas-Nebraska Act repeal the thirtyyear -old Missouri Compromise restriction, which had closed to slavery the portion of the Louisiana Purchase Territory that lay outside the borders of Missouri and north of 36°30′ longitude. The repeal reopened the debate over slavery’s expansion and transformed American politics. With surprising swiftness, the Whig Party collapsed, and the Democratic Party’s main competitor became the Republican Party, an organization that drew support exclusively from northern voters and that made opposition to slavery’s expansion its central plank. Events over the next two years kept tensions high. Settlers in Kansas split into pro- and antislavery factions, armed themselves , and, for a brief period, killed one another. On the Senate floor, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane over remarks the latter had made during the debates over “Bleeding Kansas.” During the 1856 presidential election, numerous southern politicians signaled that secession would be the price of a Republican victory. The debate over slavery’s expansion had become intractable, and elected politicians had failed to cope effectively with it. In his 1857 inaugural address, however, incoming President James Buchanan suggested that the politicians might no longer need to deal with the problem . Slavery’s status in the territories was “a judicial question, which legiti133 134 part three 1 mately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending” in the Dred Scott case. “To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.”1 Two days later, the court rendered its decision. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, speaking for a deeply divided court, passed over an opportunity to avoid the case’s controversial aspects under the Strader doctrine and issued two sweeping rulings. First, blacks were not citizens within the meaning of the Constitution, and they therefore had no right to bring suit in the federal courts. Second, Congress possessed no authority to limit the expansion of slavery into the federal territories. Submission to the ruling, however, was hardly cheerful. “Instead of quieting the subject,” wrote “A Kentucky Lawyer,” the decision only worked “further to inflame the controversy, by stimulating the already too highly excited jealousy of northern people.”2 Former Democratic Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri complained that “the opinion itself has become a new question, more virulent than the former!”3 Numerous critics found the decision weakly reasoned and unconvincing . In a lengthy and dispassionate critique, Massachusetts lawyers Horace Gray and John Lowell pronounced Taney’s opinion “unworthy of the reputation of that great magistrate.”4 “A Kentucky Lawyer” found the reasoning “as about the flimsiest and least satisfactory that ever influenced the opinion of any respectable tribunal upon an important question.” “By this single act,” he continued, the court had “done more to lower the moral tone and standard of our judiciary than any thing that has ever occurred.”5 Other critics saw more sinister forces at work. “We cannot fail to see,” wrote Judge Samuel A. Foot of New York, that the ruling gave “the country a new constitution, and a new system of law, on the subject of slavery and the government of our territories.”6 The opinion, in the estimation of a joint committee of New York’s Senate and Assembly, was simply “inhuman, unchristian , atrocious—disgraceful to the Judge who uttered it, and to the tribunal which sanctioned it.”7 Dred Scott generated such a harsh reaction among antislavery politicians in part because its rulings were so sweeping but also because the tenor of politics had become rankly antagonistic by the late 1850s. At least since the Mexican War, antislavery members of the northern wings of both the Democratic and Whig Parties had warned that a “slave power”—a conspiracy of southern politicians who would stop at nothing to protect and extend slavery—had captured the federal government. Antislavery politicians had made relatively little headway by the early 1850s, but the...

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