The decision and arguments of the Supreme Court upon the Dred Scott case were published on March 6, 1857, two days after the inauguration of President Buchanan.The decision had been agreed upon many months before, and the appeal of the negro, Dred Scott, had been decided by rulings which in no way involved the validity of the Missouri Compromise.Nevertheless, a majority of the judges determined to give to the newly developed theory of John C.Calhoun the appearance of the sanctity of law.According to Chief Justice Taney's dictum, those who made the Constitution gave to those clauses defining the power of Congress over the Territories an erroneous meaning.On numerous occasions Congress had by statute excluded slavery from the public domain.This, in the judgment of the Chief Justice, they had no right to do, and such legislation was unconstitutional and void.Specifically the Missouri Compromise had never had any binding force as law.
Property in slaves was as sacred as property in any other form, and slave-owners had equal claim with other property owners to protection in all the Territories of the United States.Neither Congress nor a territorial Legislature could infringe such equal rights.
According to popular understanding, the Supreme Court declared "that the negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect." But Chief Justice Taney did not use these words merely as an expression of his own or of the Court's opinion.He used them in a way much more contemptible and inexcusable to the minds of men of strong anti-slavery convictions.He put them into the mouths of the fathers of the Republic, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, framed the Constitution, organized state Governments, and gave to negroes full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote.But how explain this strange inconsistency? The Chief Justice was equal to the occasion.He insisted that in recent years there had come about a better understanding of the phraseology of the Declaration of Independence.The words, "All men are created equal," he admitted, "would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day they would be so understood." But the writers of that instrument had not, he said, intended to include men of the African race, who were at that time regarded as not forming any part of the people.
Therefore--strange logic!--these men of the revolutionary era who treated negroes actually as citizens having full equal rights did not understand the meaning of their own words, which could be comprehended only after three-quarters of a century when, forsooth, equal rights had been denied to all persons of African descent.
The ruling of the Court in the Dred Scott case came at a time when Northern people had a better idea of the spirit and teachings of the founders of the Republic regarding the slavery question than any generation before or since has had.The campaign that had just closed had been characterized by a high order of discussion, and it was also emphatically a reading campaign.The new Republican party planted itself squarely on the principles enunciated by Thomas Jefferson, the reputed founder of the old Republican party.They went back to the policy of the fathers, whose words on the subject of slavery they eagerly read.
Republicans had proclaimed that liberty was national and slavery municipal; that slavery had no warrant for existence except by state enactment; that under the Constitution Congress had no more right to make a slave than it had to make a king; that Congress had no power to establish or permit slavery in the Territories;that it was, on the contrary, the duty of Congress to exclude slavery.On these points the Supreme Court and the Republican party held directly contradictory opinions.
The Democratic platform of 1856 endorsed the doctrine of popular sovereignty as embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska legislation, which implied that Congress should neither prohibit nor introduce slavery into the Territories, but should leave the inhabitants free to decide that question for themselves, the public domains being open to slaveowners on equal terms with others.But once they had an organized territorial Government and a duly elected territorial Legislature, the residents of a Territory were empowered to choose either slave labor or exclusively free labor.
This at least was the view expounded by Stephen A.Douglas, though the theory was apparently rendered untenable by the ruling of the Court which extended protection to slave-owners in all the Territories remaining under the control of the general Government.It followed that if Congress had no power to interfere with that right, much less had a local territorial Government, which is itself a creature of Congress.A state Government alone might control the status of slave property.ATerritory when adopting a constitution preparatory to becoming a State would find it then in order to decide whether the proposed State should be free or slave.This was the view held by Jefferson Davis and the extreme pro-slavery leaders.Aided by the authority of the Supreme Court, they were prepared to insist upon a new plank in future Democratic platforms which should guarantee to all slave-owners equal rights in all Territories until they ceased to be Territories.Over this issue the party again divided in 1860.
Republicans naturally imagined that there had been collusion between Democratic politicians and members of the Supreme Court.
