Disunion Feed

"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 ↗