Dred Scott v. Sandford
Congress and the President had failed and now the Supreme
Court attempted to solve the slavery question. In March 1857 the
Supreme Court issued its opinion in what has been called the
worst decision ever rendered.
Dred Scott was a slave who had been born in Virginia and then
moved with his master to St. Louis, Missouri, where he was sold.
He traveled with his new master to the free state of Illinois and the
free territory of Wisconsin. In Wisconsin Dred Scott married
Harriet Robinson who then became a slave of Scott's master.
When that master Dr. John Emerson died in 1843, Dred Scott and
his wife continued to work for Emerson's widow, but they sued for
their freedom in 1846 citing a Missouri laws that stated that if a
slave returned to Missouri (a slave state) after being in a free
state or territory, then the slave is free. The local Missouri court
declared Dred Scott free and so Mr. Sanford, the brother of the
widow Emerson, appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court where
the lower court's ruling was reversed. The case wound up in the
U.S. Supreme Court (with a clerk's misspelling of Sanford's name
as Sandford).
Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the decision that Dred Scott
remained a slave giving these reasons:
1.
Dred Scott was not a U.S. citizen and therefore could not
sue in federal court. Taney said that slaves could be
citizens of a given state but not of the United States.
Justice Taney could have stopped with this reason for it
would have let stand the Missouri Supreme Court ruling
that Dred Scott was a slave. Instead he addressed the
issue of slavery's extension and in so doing widened
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the sectional rift. That southern justices dominated the
Supreme Court added to the cries about a proslavery
conspiracy.
2.
Dred Scott had never been free because the Missouri
Compromise was unconstitutional. Even though
Dred Scott lived in a free state and territory, he was
never free because slaves are property protected by
the United States Constitution.
With this decision, the Supreme Court exacerbated the sectional
tensions and caused northerners to question the Supreme Court's
role as a branch of government. Here in the Pacific Northwest,
Oregon quickly voted for statehood because the Dred Scott
decision meant that as a territory Oregon could not prohibit
slavery. Oregonians in their constitutional convention voted to
outlaw slavery but also to bar free blacks from the state. Oregon's
antislavery and anti-black decisions posed no contradiction but
were consistent with free soil ideas. Other states (Indiana, Illinois,
and Iowa) had done the same. Free soilers opposed slavery but
they did not advocate equal rights for blacks. They saw slavery as
a threat to individualism and freedom. That freedom included the
right to sell your labor; hence the Republican Party slogan, "Free
Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, Free Men."
In this 3-minute video, renowned Columbia University historian
Eric Foner discusses the Dred Scott decision.
To watch the video, please click here.
Lecompton Constitution
In Kansas, the struggle continued. A proslavery constitutional
convention meeting at Lecompton adopted a proslavery
constitution and applied to Congress for admission to the Union.
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Despite knowing that the Lecompton Constitution was not
representative of all Kansans, President Buchanan endorsed it.
Stephen Douglas opposed fellow Democrat Buchanan in
successfully convincing Congress to reject the Lecompton
document. Republicans dominated another constitutional
convention held in 1859 and in 1861 Kansas was admitted as a
free state.
Panic of 1857
South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond replied to New
York Senator William Seward's 1858 speech about the
"irrepressible conflict" over slavery with the remark: "You dare not
make war upon cotton.…Cotton is king." Hammond made his
"Cotton is King" speech in early 1858 as an economic panic
devastated the North but affected the South little. Southerners
interpreted the South's good fortune as proof of the superiority of
slave labor over free labor. Meanwhile fears in the North about
Slave Power grew.
John Brown's Holy War
This is the title of a PBS American Experience program. Explore
the program's Web site to learn more about John Brown:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/brown/index.html
You read about John Brown in Kansas at Pottawatomie Creek in
1856. In 1859 he reappears but this time at Harper's Ferry,
Virginia. John Brown dedicated his life to the abolition of slavery.
Unlike many other abolitionists, he believed in the equality of all
humans, black and white. In his raid on the federal arsenal at
Harper's Ferry, Brown and his mixed-race band hoped to start a
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slave insurrection, providing the rebelling slaves with arms from
the arsenal. You read about how poorly Brown planned the raid
as he neither informed the slaves nor mapped an escape route.
Brown was wounded, captured, and brought to trial. Stoic despite
his wounds, Brown spoke eloquently during his trial about freeing
slaves. Brown was found guilty of treason, murder, and fomenting
insurrection and hanged in December 1859.
To the South, Brown was a terrorist, a man who if he had
succeeded in arming slaves would have been responsible for the
deaths of thousands of white southerners. The North marked
Brown's hanging with tolling church bells, buildings draped in
black, abolitionists delivering eulogies. The reaction in South and
North to John Brown illustrated the schism that made
reconciliation impossible. The scene is set for the decisive
election of 1860.
©Susan Vetter 2011
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