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"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 ↗