Disunion Feed

"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 ↗