J. Robert Osborne
After the Dred Scott Decision was published and the majority opinion as written by Chief Justice Roger Taney was made public there was a veritable cataclysm of reaction from across the political spectrum and across the different parts of the then United States. It became the topic of conversation as proslavery people claimed that it once and for all vindicated the institution of slavery and the rights of slaveholders while excluding all blacks from the protection of the United States Constitution. Antislavery people were energized in their efforts to end slavery because the Taney Court had, in their eyes, sought to institutionalize slavery and encourage its growth into new territories. In 1857, as tensions were increasing, it became the political spark that was a major topic of the Lincoln Douglas Debates and it inspired John Brown to repudiate its findings in the Constitution he had prepared after the slave revolt he called for was successful. It was the topic of endless debates in the halls of the United States Congress and it became the rallying point for the Republican Party's opposition to the spread of slavery and its support of Abraham Lincoln as its Presidential Candidate in 1860 against a badly splintered remnant of the once nationally powerful Democratic Party.
What had become clear to most Americans was that the future role of the civil and political rights of blacks in this country was at stake and that the Supreme Court had come down on the side that wanted to limit or eliminate the possibility of those rights ever being realized. The South saw the decision as a victory and an endorsement of its way of life and the continuance of the institution of slavery. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had expressed what had been unexpressed, the Negro had no rights that a white man was obligated to acknowledge. If the rest of the Union couldn't accept that then they were prepared to go their own way. Many Northerners did not embrace that certitude but they were wary of extending any rights as a nation to the inhabitants of America whose ancestors were forced to come to this country from Africa as slaves. Those that opposed slavery saw the words of Taney as the proof that they needed to intensify their efforts to end slavery and address the future of blacks in this country whenever slavery was ended.
The continuing reaction to the decision was intense and powerful from all sides and it evolved in many different ways. Some of the proponents of slavery, and its expansion, saw the Dred Scott Decision as an endorsement of the enslavement of Negroes as it existed in fifteen different states and its refutation of the Missouri Compromise as the opening of the door to the expansion of slavery into the territories of the United States. They also chose to see the decision as vindication for their way of life and economic viability that was not a part of everyday life in many parts of America.
____
Opponents of slavery slaves and freedmen and supporters of the Republican Party saw it as a threat to the nation because it seemed to suggest that there was no place for the negro but enslavement and that slavery would continue to be part of the national political, moral and economic future. "It is not too much to say that this decision revolutionizes the Federal Government, and changes entirely the relation which Slavery, has hitherto held towards it. Slavery is no longer local: it is national," wrote the New York Daily News. This reaction, as well other statements of concern by Republicans, were criticized by many Democrats and slavery supporters as dangerous and disrespectful of the political and judicial process under the United States Constitution. The New York Journal Commerce reported,
-
"Our republican friends have fairly raised the standard of resurrection, and are
-
giving us the higher law in all its moods and tenses with a vengeance. They
-
declare in every way shape …… that the decision in the Dred Scott case is not
-
law, that the Judges who decided it don't know what law means, that their decision
-
is absurd and nonsensical, oppressive and tyrannical, that nobody is bound by it,
-
that nobody ought to obey it, and finally, that it should not be submitted to
-
……The long and short of it is, that the so called Republican Party is only another
-
name for Revolution and anarchy." (7)
The rhetoric was divisive, as the Dred Scott decision became the center of the national debate about its future, the future of slavery and the rights of Negroes, emancipated or enslaved. In the Lincoln Douglas Debates in Illinois the Dred Scott decision was one of the primary points of contention. Lincoln attacked the decision while Douglas supported it and then accused Lincoln of supporting equal rights for Negroes. Even though Douglas opposed the "Lecompton Constitution" for Kansas because it defied popular sovereignty with its call for legalizing slavery in Kansas, he steadfastly supported the Dred Scott decision and forced Lincoln to address the question of the rights of the Negro. In his book, The Fiery Trial, Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery , Eric Foner writes on page 95: "But the decision inspired him to elaborate his views on a subject he had said very little, the place of blacks in American society. Lincoln knew this question carried an explosive political charge. Soon after the Court issued its ruling, Stephen Douglas delivered impassioned speeches proclaiming that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had been written for whites and charging that Republicans who opposed the Dred Scott decision favored "perfect and absolute equality of the races."
Later on Foner, characterizes Lincoln's willingness to address the rights of the Negro and black citizenship instead of the politically less volatile slavery expansion issue: "He denied that Taney had presented a plausible account of the founders racial outlook. Free blacks, he pointed out, echoing Justice McLean's dissent, had voted in several states at the time the Constitution was ratified, indicating that they were then viewed as part of the body politic. Taney, moreover, was "grossly incorrect" to imply that the "public estimate of the negro" had improved since the revolutionary era; "in fact the change between then and now is decidedly the other way." (8)
In his House Divided speech that he gave to begin his campaign for the Senate in Illinois, prior to the debates Lincoln attacked the Dred Scott decision as part of a conspiracy of Douglas, Presidents Pierce and Buchanan and Chief Justice Taney. Foner continues then with this thought: "Already, the Supreme Court had denied blacks the protection of the Constitution's comity clause requiring states to accord citizens of other states the same rights as their own. It had ruled that slavery could not be barred from any territory and that Scott's temporary residence in the free state of Illinois had not made him free. The final step would be a ruling that a master could lawfully bring his slaves into any free state for any length of time he desired. Once the Dred Scott decision had been "apparently indorsed by the people" (presumably by Douglas's reelection), such a ruling would be inevitable. "We shall lie down, Lincoln warned, 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 as made Illinois, a slave state." (9)
The prospect that the future President of the United States described was very much in the minds of many. The Supreme Court, the upholders of the Constitution as the law of the land, had endorsed the rights of the slaveholders and denied the rights of the enslaved and that had emboldened the South. John Brown, wrote his Constitution for the new state he hoped to create for former slaves he sought to encourage to rebel referred directly to the Dred Scott case.
-
-
"Wheras, Slavery throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other
-
than the most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its
-
citizens against another portion, the only condition of which are perpetual
-
imprisonment, and hopeless servitude, or absolute extermination in utter disregard
-
and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths as set forth in our Declaration
-
of Independence: Therefore: We, the citizens of the United States and the
-
oppressed people, who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court (Dred Scott) are
-
declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with
-
all the other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and
-
establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and ordinances, the
-
better to protect our people, property, lives and liberties that govern our actions."
-
(10)
In less than two years, Lincoln was elected, eleven states had seceded and formed the Confederate States of America taking the institution of slavery with them, but leaving four states, the Border states behind where slavery was legal, the Union had shrunk from 37 states to 26 and there were approximately 500,000 blacks left both free and slave within the Union. The rights and citizenship of those people and prospectively the enslaved people of the Confederacy had yet to be defined.
From the early stages of the war it was evident that as Federal troops captured Confederate territory and slaves were no longer held in slavery the Federal Government knew that it would have to have a policy for dealing with recently freed former slaves. At first, they sent them back to their owners but quickly the military, General Butler in particular, seized upon the idea that as potential aid to the enemy in the form of their labor that they should be prevented from working and instead place in Contraband Camps as confiscated property. Their tie to their former servitude was severed and the numbers grew as the Federal troops took more territory but their future had yet to be decided. They were in a form of economic and political limbo without any clear path to freedom.
In 1862, members of Congress first talked about emancipating the slaves and ending their servitude. By September 22, 1862 Lincoln was convinced that emancipation was the right way to go and he announced that on January 1, 1863 he would issue a military order that would free the slaves, now and forever, that were still held in Confederate territory, or hostile territory. The slaves in territory no longer hostile, or the slaves in the border states, were not emancipated by the Emancipation Proclamation. It was another step toward ending slavery if the North won the war and it got the Congress talking about what would happen when the war was over. By August of 1863 it seemed more likely that the war would be won by the North and serious debate started over permanently ending slavery for all and then how to address the issues brought out in the Dred Scott case, what were the right of freemen going to be since slavery would no longer be legal and how to protect those rights. From the Dred Scott case and the willingness of the Supreme Court to support slavery there were few anti slavery people that felt the President's Emancipation Proclamation or an Act of Congress (like the Missouri Compromise) would be enough. Chief Justice Taney had taken the question of negro rights back to the Constitution and any possible rectifying of that question would require a Constitutional Amendment. In a sense, Roger Taney and the Court had created avoid and made it very clear to all that the best scenario for change would be the Constitution itself.
After Lincoln and the Republican Party won the election of 1864 the President and the leaders in the House and Senate could see more clearly the challenge before them. Slavery would only end with a Constitutional Amendment. Something would have to be done to protect the rights of the four and a half million about to be newly freed people and the South would have to be restored to the Union. Even for Lincoln after his management of the war and the nation it was a daunting task. Without him, it became a national nightmare. After Lincoln was assassinated and the war was over, the new President Andrew Johnson started encouraging the former Confederate states to return on pretty much their own terms to the Union. Almost immediately, the first governments of the former Confederate states started passing Black Codes to limit the rights of the negroes to be freed, or already free from servitude. The Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, was ratified in 1865 and it was clear to the recently freed people in the South that their freedom was already under attack.
President Johnson's racist views and southern sympathies antagonized the Republicans in Congress, particularly Thaddeus Stevens, the Speaker of the House, and he got Congress to pass The Civil Rights Act of 1867 to protect the rights of the freed people and then Johnson vetoed the Bill. Eventually the veto was overridden but that veto galvanized the radical Republicans in the country to pass a much more restrictive Reconstruction Bill to be imposed on the South and assign a committee to draft the 14th Amendment to bring the rights of citizen to all people born in the United States or naturalized under the protection of the United States. Federal troops were dispatched to the five reconstruction zones in the South to insure compliance by the former Confederate states and local governments.
When the Fourteenth Amendment was passed and ratified in 1868 it became the Constitutionally legal protection of individual rights in the United States. Sections Two, Three and Four were written to address the specific situation the country faced at the Amendment's Ratification but Section One is still one of the primary legal mechanisms today in the protection of equal rights for all the people. After Grant was elected in 1868 and he successfully lobbied for the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869 giving the vote to all former and free male blacks in the United States, Grant was pleased that the legacy of Dred Scott had been altered forever. In his book, The Day Freedom Died, the historian Charles Lane wrote this:
"Grant's enthusiasm for the Fifteenth Amendment, though, went beyond expediency. When it won ratification on February 3, 1870 the exulted that the people had completed the eradication of the notorious Dred Scott decision, handed down by the Supreme Court in 1857, which had declared that neither slaves nor free men of color could be citizens of the United States. He called the amendment, "a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day."
(11)