Disunion Feed

"They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

The most quoted sentence in the history of the Court. Read it precisely: Taney is stating what he claims the framing generation believed, not announcing his own moral view. But he is not describing it in passing — he uses that claimed 1787 consensus as the ground for holding that people of African descent were never included in the word "citizen" and so cannot sue in a federal court. The decision went further: it struck down the Missouri Compromise and held that Congress could not bar slavery from any territory.

Read it in the original — Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857) ↗

"At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, all free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens. [...] when a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men"

Curtis answers Taney with the record: Black men voted in five of the ratifying states, which is difficult to square with a claim that they were never meant to be citizens. He resigned from the Court within months — the only justice in its history to leave over a decision. The two fragments are from different parts of the dissent, joined with [...].

Read it in the original — Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), Curtis dissenting ↗

"Chief Justice Taney delivered to-day the opinion of the U. S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. The points are that Scott is not a citizen; that he was not manumitted by being taken by his master when a slave into the then Territory of Illinois, and that the Missouri Compromise was an act unconstitutionally passed by Congress. [...] Five of the Judges are slaveholders, and two of the other four owe their appointments to their facile ingenuity in making State laws bend to Federal demands in behalf of "the Southern institution.""

The news arrives as a wire dispatch — datelined Washington, March 6 — and the Journal prints the holding and its own verdict on the bench in the same breath. The paper's count of slaveholding justices was accurate: Taney, Wayne, Catron, Daniel and Campbell all owned or had owned slaves.

Read it in the original — Albany Evening Journal, Mar 7, 1857 ↗

"The Supreme Court has aimed a blow at State Sovereignty which is baser and more iniquitous than any thing we had before conceived of. The State of Illinois for example, under this decision in her legislative capacity, has no power to enact such a law as can make a slave coming there with the consent of his master a freeman!"

Written from the abstract that reached Pittsburgh by telegraph on Saturday morning. The Gazette goes straight to the point that would define Northern alarm for the next four years: if the master's title follows him, a free state's own laws cannot free anyone.

Read it in the original — Daily Pittsburgh Gazette, Mar 7, 1857 ↗

"To the friends of the "Wilmot Proviso" and the Abolition legislation for the Territories this decision of the Supreme Court will be most crushing and annihilating. Hereafter they will have no pretense whatever for keeping Congress and the country in a turmoil on that subject [...] The whole people, without distinction of party, have confidence in that august tribunal, the Supreme Court of the United States"

A Northern Democratic paper in a free state, reading the decision as the end of the argument rather than the start of one. The Enquirer's own city had produced the dissenter it goes on to chide — Justice John McLean of Cincinnati.

Read it in the original — Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Mar 8, 1857 ↗

"The decision just made in the Dred Scott case, an obscure African, by the Supreme Court of the United States, is probably the most important that ever emanated from that highest tribunal of our country. [...] we cannot, in the meantime, refrain from expressing our gratification that this important subject has at last had a final adjudication"

A border-state paper in Taney's own Maryland. The phrase "an obscure African" is the Sun's, and is the period's habitual disposal of the man whose name the case carries: Dred Scott had sued for his family's freedom for eleven years.

Read it in the original — The Sun (Baltimore), Mar 9, 1857 ↗

"The three hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred and twenty-five Slaveholders in the Republic, accomplished day before yesterday a great success -- as shallow men estimate success. They converted the Supreme Court of Law and Equity of the United States of America into a propagandist of human Slavery."

The Journal was Thurlow Weed's paper and the closest thing New York Republicans had to an official organ. Counting the slaveholders — 347,525 in the 1850 census — is the Republican argument in miniature: a minority interest capturing a national government.

Read it in the original — Albany Evening Journal, Mar 9, 1857 ↗

"Thus has a politico-legal question, involving others of deep import, been decided emphatically in favor of the advocates and supporters of the Constitution and the Union, the equality of the States and the rights of the South [...] A prize, for which the athletes of the nation have often wrestled in the halls of Congress, has been awarded at last, by the proper umpire, to those who have justly won it."

The semi-official organ of Virginia Democrats — the same paper that would later call Harpers Ferry the best argument for disunion. Here it treats the Court as an umpire whose ruling settles a wrestling match, a framing the North rejected within days.

Read it in the original — Richmond Enquirer, Mar 10, 1857 ↗

"We print to-day a sophistical, dogmatic, muddy, and extreme Pro-Slavery document, which future historians will speak of as the present age speaks of the edicts of Jeffries and the Star Chamber. [...] It falsifies the most reliable history, abrogates the most solemn Law, belies the dead and stultifies the living, -- in order to make what has heretofore been a local evil, hereafter a National institution!"

Written the day the Journal printed Taney's full opinion. "Jeffries" is George Jeffreys, the Lord Chief Justice of the 1685 Bloody Assizes — in the Anglo-American press of 1857, the standard byword for a judge who serves power.

Read it in the original — Albany Evening Journal, Mar 10, 1857 ↗

"the barbarism of the blow which annihilates the citizenship of all the Free colored people in the United States, has fallen with a stunning force on all who have been taught that justice is obligatory on man, and that Christianity is the social law of Humanity. The half million of men and women paralysed by the atheistic logic of the decision of the case of Dred Scott, which disfranchises them on the soil on which they were born"

The part of the ruling least discussed at the time and least remembered since: the holding reached free Black Americans, not only the enslaved. The 1850 census counted about 434,000 free people of color in the United States.

Read it in the original — Albany Evening Journal, Mar 10, 1857 ↗

"this is the most important decision every made by any Court in this country, and that it fortifies as by a wall of brass the rights of the slaveholder in the States and in the common territories. [...] The idea of the abolitionists, that a slave is free as soon as he touches the soil of a free State, is again exploded"

The Standard numbers the holdings one through six off the telegraphic dispatch and warns its own readers the summary "may not be strictly accurate." "every made" is the printed text, for "ever made." A Southern paper drawing the conclusion Northern editors most feared: the free states' soil no longer frees anyone.

Read it in the original — Weekly North Carolina Standard, Mar 11, 1857 ↗

"the great fact which it establishes -- the fact that Slavery is National; and that, until that remote period when different Judges, sitting in this same Court, shall reverse this wicked and false judgment, the Constitution of the United States is nothing better than the bulwark of inhumanity and oppression. [...] auctions of black men may be held in front of Faneuil Hall, and the slave-ship, protected by the guns of United States frigates, may land its dusky cargo at Plymouth Rock."

Greeley's Tribune had the largest circulation of any Republican paper in the country. The Faneuil Hall image is not rhetoric for its own sake: the Lemmon case, then working its way toward the same Court, asked whether a slaveholder could hold slaves in transit through New York. Everyone expected the Court to say yes.

Read it in the original — New-York Daily Tribune, Mar 11, 1857 ↗

"First, it subdued the Executive Government; second, the Legislative; and now it grasps the Judiciary. The grand object of the oligarchs has been perfected. They have made Slavery National, Freedom Sectional. [...] The Territories have become one great slave pen."

"Slavery National, Freedom Sectional" became the Republican formula of the next three years — the exact inversion of the party's own charge that it was the sectional one. Lincoln built the House Divided speech on this claim in June 1858.

Read it in the original — Ohio State Journal, Mar 11, 1857 ↗

"Men may, conscientiously we dare say, entertain opinions in opposition to those declared by this Bench, but, so far as legislative action is concerned, every man is in honor bound to respect the supreme law of the land. No man is justifiable in advocating a "higher law" -- it is treason against the cornerstone of republican institutions."

A Northern Democratic paper answering William Seward's "higher law than the Constitution" of 1850. Note the Plain Dealer's own account of the vote is garbled — it lists Curtis with the majority and Nelson as a dissenter, the reverse of the fact. Early reports of the lineup varied for days.

Read it in the original — Cleveland Plain Dealer, Mar 11, 1857 ↗

"the black republicans have wasted more breath, ink and time on the Missouri compromise, as they were pleased to call it, than it took to bring it into existence. [...] The supreme court of the United States, the highest and most dignified tribunal in any civilized country, and composed of the very first order of talent in the world, and to whose decisions it is an honor to bow with respectful deference, have had the darling bantling of black republicanism under consideration, and announce it illegitimate."

The Democratic paper of Springfield, Illinois — Lincoln's own town, and the Illinois State Journal's rival across the street. A "bantling" is a bastard child; the Register is calling the Missouri Compromise illegitimate offspring, and enjoying itself.

Read it in the original — Illinois State Register, Mar 12, 1857 ↗

"We mean to show that this Dred Scott decision is deficient in every element which should entitle it to respect -- that it violates the truth of history and the logic even of the law; and in our humble way, we mean to assist in getting it overruled. [...] When we are ready to surrender sense and reason, conscience and intellect, and all pretension to mental and physical freedom [...] then, and not till then, will we get on our knees to Roger Taney."

Answering the charge that criticizing the Court was itself treason. The Tribune's defense is that the two dissenters said the same thing — that a court's word on questions not properly before it does not bind. Getting it overruled took the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Read it in the original — New-York Daily Tribune, Mar 12, 1857 ↗

"This is a seeming blow at the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, but not quite as hard a one as we could wish the Court had given. As Congress has no power to exclude slavery from the territory and confer freedom upon negroes, it cannot confer that power on territorial agents. The stream can rise no higher than the fountain, as a matter of course."

A Mississippi paper that reads the great pro-slavery victory and wants more. The unanswered question it names — whether settlers could bar slavery on their own authority, without Congress — is exactly the gap Stephen Douglas would try to stand in at Freeport a year later, and it split the Democratic party in 1860.

Read it in the original — Natchez Daily Courier, Mar 14, 1857 ↗

"At a single blow it shatters and destroys the platform of the Republican party. It annihilates the issue which was made paramount in the recent Presidential election, and takes away from the Democratic party all the advantages of its advocacy of popular sovereignty in the Territories. It leaves both of these great parties all abroad, without a single plank of their late platforms upon which to rest."

George D. Prentice's Journal was the leading Whig-then-American paper of the border South, and the only voice in this feed to see at once that the decision wrecked both parties rather than one. It was right: the Democratic split it predicts arrived in 1860 and put Lincoln in the White House.

Read it in the original — Louisville Journal, Mar 16, 1857 ↗

"It appears that we, Secessionists, have been all the while not disturbing the law, not intruding novelties upon the country, not seeking to break up established principles, but that we have been simply a step in advance of the highest tribunal in the country, in declaring what was the law of the land, and seeking honestly and faithfully to enforce it."

The Rhetts' Mercury, the loudest secessionist paper in the South, claiming the Supreme Court has caught up with it. Three years later the same paper would print South Carolina's ordinance of secession.

Read it in the original — Charleston Mercury, Mar 17, 1857 ↗

"That decision must be carried into effect -- that interpretation must be acquiesced in and acted upon, or else it must be resisted by force. There is no other alternative. [...] nothing but force, open rebellion, can successfully oppose the practical application and enforcement of the decision of the court in this case."

Franklin Pierce's home-state Democratic organ, meaning it as a warning to Republicans. Read forward instead of back, it is one of the plainest sentences in this feed: a Northern paper stating in March 1857 that the only remaining alternatives are submission or force.

Read it in the original — Daily Patriot (Concord), Mar 18, 1857 ↗

"Five of its nine silk gowns are worn by Slaveholders. More than half its long Bench is filled with Slaveholders. Its Chief Justice is a Slaveholder. [...] The majority represent a minority of 350,000. The minority represent a majority of twenty Millions! [...] The advocate who pleads there against Slavery, wastes his voice in its vaulted roof, and upon ears stuffed sixty years with cotton. His case is judged before it is argued, and his client condemned before he is heard."

Two weeks after the ruling, the argument has shifted from the decision to the institution: the Journal counts the Court's whole history and finds slave states held the majority for fifty-seven of its sixty-eight years. The turn from "this ruling is wrong" to "this Court is captured" is the shift that made the Republican party a national one.

Read it in the original — Albany Evening Journal, Mar 19, 1857 ↗

"As far as the South is concerned, it is much like having the gap closed after the wolves have devoured all the sheep; it is but little satisfaction to her to know that she had a right to what has been stolen from her [...] "Agitation is not good for the South," says her self-appointed physicians; "she needs repose." Nay, answer we, not when repose is death."

The Delta quotes the New York Times and the Herald at length and draws the conclusion neither did: the decision hands the anti-slavery side the only solid foundation it has ever had for a national party. It also names the year the reckoning will come — 1860.

Read it in the original — New Orleans Daily Delta, Mar 19, 1857 ↗

"we shall acquire, by the decision of the Supreme Court, not one right more than they granted to us before -- not one foot of slave territory more than we would have acquired without it."

Three weeks on, the most extreme Southern paper in the country turns on the victory it had just claimed. Its argument is that a court opinion changes nothing on the ground, and that the South is being lulled by "Union-savers" into mistaking a paper triumph for security. Written as sustained mock-scripture — the millennium has come, peace reigns, and none of it is real.

Read it in the original — Charleston Mercury, Mar 27, 1857 ↗

""Who are those neighbors we are commanded to love as ourselves? [...] Or is it the African slave, who is not our neighbor is any one sense of the word, as applied to the great commandment?" Who made Mr. Buchanan or his mouth-piece, a judge or divider of races, and a perverter of Scripture truth? Its inspiration comes not from above, for St. Paul distinctly declares that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the whole earth,""

The fight moves to scripture. The Washington Union was Buchanan's administration organ; the Journal answers it with Acts 17:26 and sends it to read Matthew 25 and Luke 10. "is any one sense" is the printed text, for "in any one sense."

Read it in the original — Ohio State Journal, Mar 31, 1857 ↗

"The late decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Dred Scott case, will bring the enemies of the South face to face with the Constitution of their country. They cannot escape the issue presented -- the observance of the laws of the land, or disunion."

The Democratic paper of Georgia's capital, stating the choice in one line four years before it was taken. The Federal Union expects the North to submit; it is confident the fury of the storm has passed.

Read it in the original — Federal Union (Milledgeville), Mar 31, 1857 ↗

"The continued aggressions of the Federal Government in behalf of Negro Slavery must be met by the States in which the principles of Liberty yet survive. Ohio took the lead in 1855 in opposition to the Kansas Nebraska act, and it is very proper that she should again lead the column of Freedom in opposition to the doctrines recently promulgated by a Federal Slaveholding Court."

Four weeks after the ruling, the response stops being editorial and becomes legislative: an Ohio committee reports resolutions against the decision. Northern states answering a federal ruling with state resistance is the shape of the next four years — and the exact argument the South had been making since 1832.

Read it in the original — Ohio State Journal, Apr 3, 1857 ↗

"The fact is, the more the question has been settled, the more it has needed settling. The space between the different settlements has been strikingly on the decrease. [...] The first stood fifteen years — the second, ten years- — the third, five years — the fourth stood four years — and the fifth has stood the brief space of two years. [...] This last settlement must be called the Taney settlement."

From the pamphlet Douglass printed at his own press in Rochester later that year. He is counting the compromises — 1820, 1833, 1845, 1850, 1854, and now 1857 — and pointing out that each one holds for less time than the last. The stray hyphen after "ten years" is in the pamphlet's own printing.

Read it in the original — Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass (Rochester, 1857) ↗

"The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world. [...] Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot perform impossibilities. He cannot bale out the ocean, annihilate this firm old earth, or pluck the silvery star of liberty from our Northern sky."

Asked how the decision affected him, Douglass answered that his hopes were never brighter. His reasoning was strategic, not consoling: a ruling this extreme could not be absorbed quietly, and would force the country to decide. The one voice in this feed belonging to a man the decision declared could never be a citizen.

Read it in the original — Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass (Rochester, 1857) ↗