Making Our Democracy Work Read Online Free PDF Page B

throughout the nation. The
Dred Scott
case would give the Court theopportunity to justify the legal hopes of one region or the other by clarifying the legal status of slaves brought by their owners into free territory.

T HE A FTERMATH
     
    T HE C OURT ISSUED its decision in early March 1857, and the chief justice issued his written opinion later in the spring. The South and southern sympathizers reacted favorably. President Buchanan (perhaps forewarned) favorably referred to the opinion in his March inaugural address and again in his December State of the Union address. But the northern reaction was vehemently negative. Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
described the holding as “wicked” and “atrocious.” “If epithets and denunciation could sink a judicial body,” another observer wrote, “the Supreme Court … would never be heard of again.” 23
    A joint committee of the New York legislature reported that the decision had “destroyed the confidence of the people in the Court,” predicted that it would be overruled, and described Taney’s statement that people of African descent had no rights as
“inhuman, unchristian, atrocious
,—disgraceful to the judge who uttered it and to the tribunal which sanctioned it.” The committee said the opinion paved the way for slavery’s spread to free states. If “a master may take his slave into a Free State without dissolving the relation of master and slave,” then “some future decision of the Pro-Slavery majority of the Supreme Court will authorize a slave-driver … to call the roll of his manacled gang at the foot of the monument on Bunker Hill, reared and consecrated to freedom.” 24
    The case had increasing reverberation. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass offered a slightly different analysis. In a New York lecture he remarked that despite this “devilish decision” produced by “the slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court,” the Court could not make “evilgood” or “good evil.” The decision, he concluded, “is a means of keeping the nation awake on the subject.… [M]y hopes were never brighter than now.” 25
    Indeed, the decision did keep the nation awake. Northern supporters widely circulated the Curtis dissent in pamphlet form. Abraham Lincoln, then a Republican candidate for Senate, spoke often about the decision, describing it as an “astonisher in legal history” while arguing that Taney’s “whites only” views had turned “our once glorious Declaration” of Independence into a “wreck” and “mangled ruin.” In February 1860, Lincoln based his Cooper Union speech—a speech that helped make him a national political figure—on Curtis’s dissent. Lincoln fed the North’s fear of spreading slavery by asking, what “is necessary for the nationalization of slavery? It is simply the next
Dred Scott
decision. It is merely for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that under the Constitution neither Congress nor the Territorial legislature can do it.” 26
    Although historians debate the precise role of
Dred Scott
in bringing on the Civil War, the decision at least energized the anti-slavery North. It became the Republican Party’s rallying cry and contributed to Lincoln’s nomination and election as president. These circumstances together with others helped bring about that most fierce War Between the States. After the war, the nation added the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, ending slavery while guaranteeing equal treatment, voting rights, and basic civil rights for the newly freed slaves.
    On a more personal level: Benjamin Curtis resigned from the Court immediately after the
Dred Scott
decision. Chief Justice Taney remained on the bench until his death. Dred Scott and his family were bought by a son of his original owner, Peter Blow, who set them all free. Within little more than a year, however, Scott