Disunion Feed

"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 ↗