The Gathering Storm
The Dred Scott Decision
On March 6, 1857, in a small room in the Capitol basement, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories.
In 1846, a Missouri slave, Dred Scott, sued for his freedom. Scott argued that while he had been the slave of an army surgeon, he had lived for four years in Illinois, a free state, and Wisconsin, a free territory, and that his residence on free soil had erased his slave status. In 1850, a Missouri court gave Scott his freedom, but two years later, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed this decision and returned Scott to slavery. Scott then appealed to the federal courts.
For five years, the case proceeded through the federal courts. For more than a year, the Supreme Court withheld its decision. Many thought that the Court delayed its ruling to ensure a Democratic victory in the 1856 elections. Then, in March 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney announced the Court’s decision. By a 7-2 margin, the Court ruled that Dred Scott had no right to sue in federal court, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that Congress had no right to exclude slavery from the territories.
All nine justices rendered separate opinions, but Chief Justice Taney delivered the opinion that expressed the position of the Court’s majority. His opinion represented a judicial defense of the most extreme proslavery position.
The chief justice made two sweeping rulings. The first was that Dred Scott had no right to sue in federal court because neither slaves nor free blacks were citizens of the United States. At the time the Constitution was adopted, the chief justice wrote, blacks had been “regarded as beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Second, Taney declared that Congress had no right to exclude slavery from the federal territories since any law excluding slavery property from the territories was a violation of the Fifth Amendment prohibition against the seizure of property without due process of law. For the first time since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional.
Newspaper headlines summarized the Court’s rulings: SLAVERY ALONE NATIONAL—THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE UNCONSTITUTIONAL—NEGROES CANNOT BE CITIZENS—THE TRIUMPH OF SLAVERY COMPLETE.
In a single decision, the Court sought to resolve all the major constitutional questions raised by slavery. It declared that the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were not intended to apply to black Americans. It stated that the Republican Party platform—barring slavery from the western territories—was unconstitutional. And it ruled that Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty”—which stated that territorial governments had the power to prohibit slavery—was also unconstitutional.
Republicans reacted with scorn. The decision, said the New York Tribune, carried as much moral weight as “the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington barroom.” Many Republicans—including an Illinois politician named Abraham Lincoln—regarded the decision as part of a slave power conspiracy to legalize slavery throughout the United States.
The Dred Scott decision was a major political miscalculation. In its ruling, the Supreme Court sought to solve the slavery controversy once and for all. Instead the Court intensified sectional strife, undercut possible compromise solutions to the divisive issue of the expansion of slavery, and weakened the moral authority of the judiciary.
The Gathering Storm
In 1858, Senator William H. Seward of New York examined the sources of the conflicts between the North and the South. Some people, said Seward, thought the sectional conflict was “accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral.” Seward believed that these people were wrong. The roots of the conflict went far deeper. “It is an irrepressible conflict,” Seward said, “between opposing and enduring forces.”
By 1858, a growing number of Northerners were convinced that two fundamentally antagonistic societies had evolved in the nation, one dedicated to freedom, the other opposed. They had come to believe that their society was locked in a life and death struggle with a Southern society dominated by an aggressive slave power, which had seized control of the federal government and imperiled the liberties of free people. Declared the New York Tribune: “We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.”
History Through…
…Primary Sources: A White Southern Condemns Slavery–and the Slave Power
In 1857, Hinton Rowan Helper, the son of a western North Carolina farmer, published one of the most politically influential books ever written by an American. The Impending Crisis of the South, the book argued that slavery was incompatible with economic progress. Using statistics drawn from the 1850 census, Helper maintained that by every measure the North was growing far faster than the South and that slavery was the cause of the South’s economic backwardness.
Helper’s thesis was that slavery was inefficient and wasteful, that it impoverished the South, degraded labor, inhibited urbanization, thwarted industrialization, and stifled progress. A rabid racist, Helper accompanied his call for abolition with a demand for colonization. He concluded with a call for nonslaveholders to overthrow the South’s planter elite.
During the 1860 presidential campaign, the New York Tribune distributed 500 copies of the book a day, considering it the most effective propaganda against slavery ever written. Many Southerners burned it, fearful that it would divide the white population.
Hinton Rowan Helper (1860) Compendium of the Impending Crisis of the South, GLB 181.03
The value of all the property, real and personal, including slaves, in seven slave States, Virginia, North Carolina, Tenneessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, is less than the real and personal estate, which is unquestionably property, in the single state of New York. Nay, worse, if eight entire slave States, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas, and the District of Columbia—with all their hordes of human merchandise—were put up at auction, New York could buy them all, and then have one hundred and thirty-three millions of dollars left in her pocket! Such is the amazing contrast between freedom and slavery, even in a pecuniary point of view. When we come to compare the North with the South in regard to literature, general intelligence, inventive genius, moral and religious enterprises, the discoveries in medicine, and the progress in the arts and sceinces, we shall in every instance, find the contrast equally great on the side of Liberty.
It gives us no pleasure to say hard things of the Old Dominion, the mother of Washington, Jefferson, Henry, and other illustrious patriots, who, as we shall prove hereafter, were genuine abolitionists; but the policy which she has pursued has been so utterly inexcusable, so unjust to the non-slaveholding whites, so cruel to the Negroes, and so disregardful of the rights of humanity at large, that it becomes the duty of every one who makes allusion to her history, to expose her follies, her crimes, and her poverty, and to publish every fact, of whatever nature, that would be instrumental in determining others to eschew her bad example….In a subsequent chapter, we expect to show that all, or nearly all, the distinguished Virginians, whose bodies have been consigned to the grave,…were inflexibly opposed to the extension of slavery into the Territories, devised measures for its restrition, and, with hopeful anxiety, looked forward to the time when it should be eradicated from the States themselves. With them, the rescue of our country from British domination, and the establishment of the General Government upon a firm basis, were considerations of paramount iortance; they supposed, and no doubt earnestly desired, that the States, in their sovereign capacities, would soon abolish a system of wrong and despotism which was so palpably in conflict with the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, it would seem that, among the framers of that immortal sequel, the Constitution of the United States, there was a tacit understanding to this effect; and the Northern Sattes, true to their implied faith, abolished it within a short period after our national independence had been secured. Not so with the South….
Once more to the Old Dominion. At her door we lay the bulk of the evil of slavery. The first African sold in America was sold on James River, in that State, on the 20th of August, 1620; and although the instituion was fastened upon her and the other colonies by the mother country, she was the first to perceive its blighting and degrading influence, her wise men were the first to denounce it, and, after the British power was overthrown at Yorktown, she should have been the first to abolish it. Fifty-seven years ago she was the Empire State; now, with half a dozzen other slaveholding States thrown into the scale with her she is far inferior to New York, which, at the time Cornwallis surrendered his sword to Washington, was less than half her equal. Had she obeyed the counsels of the good,…the extensible element of slavery would have been promptly arrested, and the virgin soil of nine Southern States, Kentucky, tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, would have been saved form its horrid pollutions. Confined to the original States in which it existed, the system would soon have been disposed of by legislative enactments, and long before the present day, by a gradual process that could have shocked no interest and alarmed no prejudice, we should have rid ourselves not only of African slavery, which is an abomination and a curse, but also of the Negroes themselves, who, in our judgment, whether viewed in relation to their actual characteristics and condition, or through the strong antipathies of the whites, are, to say the least, an undesirable population….
Non-slaveholders of the South! farmers, mechanics and workingmen, we take this occasion to assure you that the slaveholding politicians whom you have elected to offices of honor and profit, have hoodwinked you, trifled with you, andused you as mere tools for the consummation of their wicked designs. They have purposely kept you in ignorance, and have, by molding your passions and prejudices to suit themselves, induced you to act in direct opposition to your dearest rights and interests. By a system of the grossest subterfuge and misrepresentation, and in order to avert, for a season, the vengeance that will most assuredly overtake them ere long, they have taught you to hate the lovers of libverty, who are yor best and only true friends. Now, as one of your own number, we appeal to you to join us in our earnest and timely effort to rescue the generous soil of the South from the usurped and desolating control of these political vampires. Once and forever, at lesat so far as this country is concerned, the infernal question of slavery must be disposed of; a speedy and absolute abolishment of the whole system is the true policy of the South–and this is the policy which we propose to pursue. Will you aid us, will you assist us, will you be freemen, or will you be slaves!…Consider well the aggressive, fraudulent and depotic power which they have exercised in the affairs of Kansas; and remember that, if, by adhering to erroneous principles of neutrality or non-resistance, you allow them to force the curse of slavery on that or any other vast and fertile field, the broad area of all the surrounding States and Territories–the whole nation, in fact–will soon fall a prey to their diabolical intrigues and machinations.
In our opinion, an opinion which has been formed from data obtained by assiuous researches, and comparisons, from laborious investigation, logical reasoning, and earnest reflection, the causes which have impeded the progress of the South, which have dwindled our commerce, and other similar pursuits, into the most contemptible insignificance; sunk a large majority of our people in galling poverty and ignorance, rendered a small minority conceited and tyrannical, and driven the rest away from their homes; entailed upon us a humiliating dependence on the Free States; disgraced us in the recesses of our own souls, and brought us under reproach in the eyes of all civilized and enlightened nations–may all be traced to one common source, and therefind solution inthe hateful and horrible word, that was ever incorporated into the vocabulary of human economy–Slavery!….
Our soul involuntarily, but justly we believe, cries out for retribution against the treachous, slavedriving legislativors, who have so basely and unpatriotically neglected the interests of their poor white constituents and bargained away the rights of posterity. Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are the majority, as five to one, they have never yet had any part or lot in framing the laws under which they live. There is no legislation except fo rhte benefit of slavery, and slaveholders. As a general rule, poor white persons are regarded with less esteem and attention than Negroes, and though the condition of the latter is wretched beyond description, vast numbers of the former are infinitely worse off….
To the illiterate poor whites—made poor and ignorant by the system of slavery—they hold out the idea that slavery is the very bulwark of our liberties, and the foundation of American independence!…
The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, who are bought and sold, and driven about like so many cattle, but they are also the oracles and arbiters of all non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated….
It is expected that the stupid and sequacious masses, the white victims of slavery, will believe, and, as a general thing, they do believe, whateve the slaveholders tell them; and thus it is that they are cajoled into the notion that they are the freest, happiest and most intelligent people in the world, and are taught to look with prejudice and disapprobation upon every new principle or progressive movement. Thus it is that the South, woefully inert and inventionless, has lagged behind the North, and is now weltering in the cesspool of ignorance and degradation.