Disunion Feed

"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 ↗