decisions to a crisis point very quickly in the years between 1856 and 1860.
It is not surprising that in the midst of this intense sectional debate over constitutional rights and slavery that the Supreme Court should become involved. Many hoped the Supreme Court’s decision on the legality of extending slavery in the territories would put the issue to rest once and for all. Of course, many of these same people had hoped the Kansas-Nebraska Act would settle the issue forever, too.
SOME COLD, HARD FACTS TO CONSIDER
As both the North and South became increasingly hostile to each other, both regions rhetorically wrapped themselves in the mantle of purity and righteousness. It needs to be made clear that neither section was free of the fear and hostility to Blacks, whether free or slave. In the South, the slave system, however beneficent and humane, depended in the end on the threat of violence to compel obedience and compliance. In this way, it was a tyrannical system and a damning charge against the institution. The North, which was more than 98% white in 1860, was hostile to Blacks. Laws restricted civil liberties, such as voting; schools and many churches, theaters, restaurants, rail cars, and hotels were strictly segregated. Blacks could not testify against whites in court, and some Midwest states banned Blacks from entering their states altogether. Blacks in the cities of the North lived in bleak conditions. Jobs were scarce, as whites preferred to hire Irish immigrants. Violence directed against Blacks was commonplace, and sympathetic support was rare. Thus, the larger problem in America was not slavery, per se, but the fact that Blacks and whites were coexisting in two vastly different and separate worlds.
The Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott, a slave belonging to an army doctor, had been taken from Missouri, which allowed slavery, to two non-slaveholding states, Illinois and Wisconsin, in the 1830s. After the doctor’s death, Scott claimed he was no longer a slave because he had resided in free states. The case wound its way through the lower courts until it came to the Supreme Court in 1856. Lawyers are sometimes more confusing than historians. Essentially, Scott’s lawyers argued that a slave once in free territory was a free man.
In retrospect, the Supreme Court could have avoided a great deal of trouble by simply ruling in favor of the lower court’s decision, which pointed out that the Constitution did not recognize slaves as citizens. But because slavery and its extension into new territories had become such a contentious issue, the Court took on Scott’s case with the goal of settling the issue once and for all. Unfortunately, the Court was involving itself into a highly volatile political situation. This was not the time for another view to be added to a very angry debate. Nevertheless, Roger B. Taney, the chief justice (and a Southern Democrat), lit the fuse on the powder keg.
The Court ruled seven to two against Scott’s claim. Interestingly, each judge decided to write his own opinion. Taney’s became the decision of record. On the basic issue of Scott’s freedom, the Court agreed with the lower court’s determination that Scott was not a citizen of either a state or the United States, and therefore could not bring a suit before a court. Taney could have stopped there, but he went on to find that Scott was still a slave because neither Congress nor any territorial legislature had the authority to restrict slavery anywhere.
SECESSION, NORTHERN STYLE
People tend to associate the concept of secession only with the South. Actually the first region to threaten to secede, or leave the Union, was New England, which was a stronghold of the Federalist Party. Despairing over the United States’ apparent defeat in the War of 1812 and never supporting the war in the first place, New England threatened to leave the Union. In fact, the Federalists began organizing a convention to take the New England states out of the Union. The enthusiasm for this bold act quickly disappeared as news of American battlefield victories and a peace settlement arrived. The Federalists slunk away in shame and soon disappeared as a national political party.
The reaction to the decision
The reaction to Taney’s ruling was predictable: The South celebrated, crowing that the constitutional guarantees of property (described in the Fourth Amendment) were secured once and for all. No governmental body had the authority to restrict the movement of slaves, who had been declared inviolable property by the highest court in the land. The North condemned the ruling, describing it as a politically motivated act by a pro-Southern Supreme Court. The Court, they noted, seemed to ignore the fact that the Constitution also spoke of guarantees to freedom in the same sentence that it guaranteed property in the Fourth Amendment. Northerners complained that Taney also forgot to look at Article IV, Section 3, of the Constitution, which clearly gives Congress the power to administer territories.
The can of worms is opened
In one blow the Supreme Court unwittingly toppled the delicate house of cards built since 1820 to maintain sectional harmony over the issue of slavery’s expansion. Neither popular sovereignty (the authority for people in the territories to decide whether to allow slavery to exist) nor the geographical limitations laid out by the Missouri Compromise were valid any longer. The Court’s decision opened all of the United States and its territories to slave owners. Congress (with its Northern voting bloc majority in the House of Representatives) could do nothing about it. By declaring that no law could restrict the movement of slaves, the Court placed human beings in the same category as furniture or livestock. Property has no rights to itself, and as such under the Constitution, people cannot be deprived of their property without due process of law.
The firestorm in the North
Northern radical abolitionists, were, of course, outraged by the Dred Scott decision, but, more importantly, Northern moderates were greatly upset by it too. The decision was too much for Northerners to take, so they declared that they would not obey the Court. This is the first instance of “Massive Resistance” to a Supreme Court decision. Several Northern state legislatures passed resolutions declaring the Court’s decision invalid and nonbinding. Some state legislatures refused to provide any assistance to the federal government in prosecuting anyone who violated the Fugitive Slave Law (see Chapter 1).
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
In 1852, in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law, Harriet Beecher Stowe (see the following image), a member of a prominent abolitionist family, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel portraying the problems of slavery in the South. The novel, typical in many ways of the sentimental writing of this period, nevertheless tells a powerfully effective story using characters that have become stock characters in American culture: Little Eva, the pure little girl destined for heaven; Uncle Tom, the kindly, Christ-like Black servant; and Simon Legree, the brutal and degraded slave owner. It sold 100,000 copies in two months, and 300,000 in its first year. For 1852, these are impossibly large numbers. Like the bestseller Jaws, which made the idea of shark attack so real that everyone was afraid to swim in the ocean, Uncle Tom’s Cabin created frightening images of the South in the minds of its readers. Despite howls of outrage from Southerners, Stowe’s image of a benighted South and Southerners as a collection of depraved sadists became reality, convincing thousands of Northerners that slavery’s very existence was a moral blight on the soul of America. When Abraham Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
