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[1], Introduction Beyond the Sectional Crisis on march 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney secured his claim to infamy when he delivered the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Speaking for a fragmented majority composed of all five of the court’s southerners and two of their northern colleagues, Taney held that no African American had ever been or ever could be a citizen of the United States. He then declared that Congress possessed no authority to limit slavery ’s expansion into the federal territories.1 With that ruling, the Supreme Court inserted itself into the central political debates of the 1850s and helped push the United States toward civil war. Commentary on Dred Scott has invariably linked the decision to the sectional crisis that dominated American politics on the eve of the Civil War. Some critics have considered Dred Scott a legally correct ruling issued by a court that failed to understand the limits of its own authority, while others have viewed the decision as a hopelessly partisan ruling that was, in the words of Republican editor Horace Greeley, “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” Either way, these observers have assumed that sectional politics constituted the primary motivation behind the decision.2 Contemporary understanding of Dred Scott owes much to the criticism developed by Republicans such as Greeley in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, which in effect declared unconstitutional their stance against slavery’s expansion. As David Potter has noted, Republicans circumvented charges that they stood for “Revolution and anarchy,” in the words of one paper, by shifting their criticism away from the decision’s merits and focusing instead on the court’s failure to confine itself to the issues necessary to resolve the case.3 Republicans therefore contended that Taney and his asso1 2 introduction 1 ciates bypassed an opportunity to dismiss Dred Scott on a narrow, relatively uncontroversial, point and instead rendered a sweeping ruling that favored the proslavery positions of the court’s southern justices, all of whom had connections to the Democratic Party. The circumstances surrounding the case raised other questions as well. Why did the Democrats insist in the early 1850s that slavery’s status in the territories was a “judicial question”? Why did the justices delay rendering their decision until after a presidential election in which the Republican Party had emerged as a serious contender? Why did the newly inaugurated president, James Buchanan, shortly after exchanging whispers with his fellow Democrat, Taney, preach adherence to the decision two days before the court handed it down? “These things,” future president Abraham Lincoln said in 1858, “look like the cautious patting and petting of a spirited horse . . . when it is dreaded that he might give the rider a fall.”4 For Lincoln and other Republicans, the answer to these questions was obvious: the Supreme Court had become an instrument of a “slave power” conspiracy. Taney and his associates overreached because they planned to open all federal territory to slavery and to set the stage for the institution’s expansion into the North. Lincoln outlined this scenario in his famous 1858 “House Divided” speech: “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. . . . It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it . . . or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.” Lincoln then discussed an elaborate conspiracy in which Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, and Chief Justice Taney followed a plan in which they simultaneously barraged the public with amoral arguments to “care not whether slavery be voted down or voted up” outside of their own states and pursued a legislative and judicial strategy designed to impose slavery in both the western territories and the North. “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.”5 Most historians would now reject the particulars of Lincoln’s conspiracy theory, which he admitted he could not prove. Yet few scholars would deny the Republicans’ larger premise that Dred Scott was the product of judicial overreaching and sectional partisanship among...

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