JUDGE ROGER TANEY AND THE DREDD SCOTT DECISION THAT STARTED THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

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NOW. 

ALPHAEUS HISTORY RADIO

 - ROGER TANEY AND THE DREDD SCOTT DECISION THAT STARTED THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR. 

THIS IS FROM ARIZONA P B S.

In March of 1857, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all blacks -- slaves as well as free -- were not and could never become citizens of the United States. The court also declared the 1820 Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, thus permitting slavery in all of the country's territories.

The case before the court was that of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin before moving back to the slave state of Missouri, had appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes of being granted his freedom.

Taney -- a staunch supporter of slavery and intent on protecting southerners from northern aggression -- wrote in the Court's majority opinion that, because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The framers of the Constitution, he wrote, believed that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it."

Referring to the language in the Declaration of Independence that includes the phrase, "all men are created equal," Taney reasoned that "it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration. . . ."

Abolitionists were incensed. Although disappointed, Frederick Douglass, found a bright side to the decision and announced, "my hopes were never brighter than now." For Douglass, the decision would bring slavery to the attention of the nation and was a step toward slavery's ultimate destruction.

On June 16, 1858, at the Illinois Republican convention in Springfield, Abraham Lincoln kicked off his bid for the U.S. Senate with a speech that would come to be known as the "House Divided" speech.

Lincoln believed that the recent Supreme Court decision on the Dred Scott case was part of a Democratic conspiracy that would lead to the legalization of slavery in all states. Referring to the court's decision which permitted Dred Scott to live in a free state and yet remain a slave, he said, "what Dred's Scott's master might lawfully do with Dred Scott, in the free state of Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any other one, or one thousand slaves, in Illinois, or in any other free state."

Professor David Blight on the Dred Scott decision. From Arizona PBS Television Resource Bank Contents

Question: Please discuss the significance of the Dred Scott decision for David W. Blight, Professor of History and Black Studies, Amherst College

Answer: The significance of the Dred Scott decision is that it comes in the wake of Bleeding Kansas, it comes three years after the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The country has now struggled for three years to understand the implications of popular sovereignty in the West and how the West would be settled, free or slave. And now this case of old Dred Scott finally gets to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court says not only did Dred Scott not have the right to even sue in a federal court because he's black and [not] a citizen, but it goes one step further. It goes for a much broader decision, and in Chief Justice Taney's words, blacks had no rights which whites had to recognize.

In the wake of the Dred Scott decision, spring of 1857, to be black in America was to live in the land of the Dred Scott decision, which, in effect, said, "You have no future in America." So, for the next three to three and a half years, down to the outbreak of the Civil War -- and we must remember, nobody knew that war was coming when it was coming -- to be black in America in the late 1850s was to live in a land that said you didn't have a future.

In the North, legislatures and Republican politicians responded to the Dred Scott decision by questioning whether this was a Supreme Court decision that they should abide by -- one of the issues that were clearly at stake in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Stephen Douglas pressed Lincoln on this, of course, and Lincoln, in effect, ultimately said that the Republican Party would remain hostile to the Dred Scott decision.

The Dred Scott decision did cause a genuine level of despair in northern black communities by the summer of 1856, and for some years after that. In speech after speech, in 1857 and '58, Frederick Douglass would do his customary thing: He would begin with hope in his speech, but he usually ended his speeches in 1857 and '58 with that Biblical line that said, uh, "I walk by faith and not by sight." He was struggling by that point to make the argument to his fellow blacks that they had a future in America.

That period between 1857 and the outbreak of the war in 1861 is a time of increasing desperation among northern black leadership. They begin to struggle even with each other over how to define their futures. They have bitter debates over immigration schemes and whether to stay in America, whether to join this Republican Party, or find some way to join it, whether to organize even some kind of third political party movement. There had been a movement in the '50s called the Radical Abolition Party. It's a desperate time for black leaders because they've been told now that their people have no future in the country, and their struggle now is to define a future.

The Dred Scott decision, the birth of the Republican Party, this whole new political crisis over slavery, is also important in the South among slaves themselves. We have plenty of evidence that shows us that, beginning in 1856, with the presidential election campaign of 1856, and again in '58 Congressional elections, and certainly in 1860, there's a lot of reaction in the Southern white press, saying that slave owners should keep their slaves away from political meetings, because the more slaves gather around these political meetings, the more they're going to become aware of the political crisis over slavery.

And from 1856 to the outbreak of the Civil War, there was a great deal of talk in the southern press about what were called "insurrection scares". There was insurrection scares particularly in Texas in 1860. Now, often these were plots about which people knew next to nothing. These were fears as much as they were reality. But there's no question that among the slaves in the South, in certain areas, they were becoming completely aware that there was a larger political crisis out there in the land over them, over slavery.

This is s d c news one radio, for Alphaeus History Radio one. This product is created by Coleman Kestin and Smith A I technologies, a subsidiary of SDC OmniMedia group.