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 ↗

"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 ↗