Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (review)

2007 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-417
Author(s):  
Keith E. Whittington
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
The Supreme Court

Disputing the Supreme Court Decision, 1857

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. Moore ◽  
Jane Ann Moore
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy's criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the case of Dred Scott. The Dred Scott decision, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, affirmed that slaves were not citizens and indeed “had no rights which a white man was bound to accept.” Lincoln and Lovejoy denounced the Supreme Court's interpretation that the Constitution provided federal authority to reduce human beings to property without rights, accusing it of political abuse of judicial power. This chapter begins with a discussion of the Illinois Supreme Court's previous rulings in connection with the slave transit law, along with Lincoln and Lovejoy's argument that humans could not legally be reduced to property under the Constitution. It then considers the two men's views on religion and politics as well as their response to the Dred Scott decision. It also looks at Lincoln and Lovejoy's preparations for the 1858 elections.

Constitutional Law in 1934–35

1936 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-89
Author(s):  
Robert E. Cushman
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Basic Program ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
Major Significance ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
National Life ◽  
Reconstruction Period ◽  
The New Deal

In the 1934 term, the Supreme Court came to grips with some of the major constitutional problems of the New Deal and rendered decisions more intimately affecting our national life than any since the Dred Scott case of 1857. The great slavery decision rocked the nation to its foundations by its futile attempt to solve a problem insoluble by any means save war. The important constitutional decisions of the Reconstruction period in their immediate consequences affected mainly the South, and it will be remembered that by a series of side-steppings, some involuntary and some not, the Supreme Court escaped the necessity of passing squarely upon the validity of the basic program of Reconstruction as embodied in the act of 1867. Forty years ago, in its 1894 term, the Court incurred much unpopularity by three decisions of major significance. It invalidated the Income Tax Act passed in fulfillment of Democratic campaign pledges; it emasculated, temporarily at least, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by holding it inapplicable to a most obvious and vicious monopoly—the sugar trust; and it incurred the hostility of organized labor by sustaining the issuance by a federal court of a labor injunction. None of these decisions was, however, nor were all of them together, as far-reaching in significance as those handed down in the last term of Court.

“Beings of an Inferior Order”

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Peter Irons
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
State Court ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
Black Person ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The Impact

This chapter discusses the role of the legal system, including the Supreme Court, in upholding the constitutionality of slavery. It first examines the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842, in which the Supreme Court reversed the conviction in state court of Edward Prigg, a professional slave-catcher, for kidnapping Margaret Morgan, who escaped from slavery in Maryland to the free state of Pennsylvania. Ruling that state officials could not hinder enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the Court also held that state officials could decline to aid slave-catchers, leading to mass demonstrations in Boston over the “rendition” of escaped slaves George Latimer and Anthony Burns. The chapter includes a recounting of the infamous Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney held that no Black person was a citizen and that Blacks were “an inferior order of beings” who had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of the impact of the Dred Scott ruling on the presidential campaign of 1860, in which Abraham Lincoln denounced the decision and provoked the slave states to secede from the Union and launch the Civil War.

Leadership in the Long Emergency

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Orr
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Court Ruling ◽  
Supreme Court Ruling ◽  
Supreme Court Justice ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Government

In june of 1858 abraham lincoln began his address at Springfield, Illinois by saying, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” He spoke on the issue of slavery that day with a degree of honesty that other politicians were loath to practice. At Springfield he asserted that “A house divided against itself cannot stand . . . this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” His immediate targets were the evasions and complications of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Supreme Court ruling handed down in the Dred Scott case, but particularly those whom he accused of conspiring to spread slavery to states where it did not already exist. In his speech Lincoln accused Senator Stephen Douglas, President Franklin Pierce, Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, and President James Buchanan of a conspiracy to spread slavery. This accusation was supported by circumstantial evidence such that it was “impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.” His opponent in the upcoming Senatorial election, Stephen Douglas, he described as a “caged and toothless” lion. Lincoln had begun the process of “framing” the issue of slavery without equivocation, but in a way that would still build electoral support based on logic, evidence, and eloquence. On February 27, 1860, Lincoln’s address at the Cooper Institute in New York extended and deepened the argument. He began with words from Stephen Douglas: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” He proceeded to analyze the historical record to infer what the “fathers” actually believed. Lincoln in a masterful and lawyerly way identified 39 of the founders who had “acted on the question” of slavery in decisions voted on in 1784, 1787, 1789, 1798, 1803, and 1820.

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