The April 9 quote from Edward Sebesta's Web site is once again from Jefferson Davis. This one concerns the notorious Dred Scott decision, which was a major factor in bringing on the Civil War. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote what was probably the most disastrous Supreme Court decision in the history of the United States. (Bush v. Gore would be a major contender, but we don't know the final consequences of that one yet.) I won't quote Davis' statement here, which blamed the abolitionists for all the trouble the decision caused. Instead, I'll talk about the decision itself.
Taney (whose name was pronounced like "Toney") had been US Attorney General under President Andrew Jackson, and later became Secretary of the Treasury. Ironically, though history rightly remembers him as worst of the worst reactionaries in US history for the Dred Scott decision, he achieved a reputation during the Jackson Administration as an economic radical (i.e., of the left-wing variety) during the fight with the Bank of the United States. It was Old Hickory himself who nominated him to be Chief Justice in 1835.
But Taney stands as a reminder and embodiment of the contradictions of Jacksonian democracy. There was the side of the movement that fought for an expansion of democracy and an empowerment of the majority, which Taney represented in the battle over the Bank. And there was the side that represented Southern whites in their slaveholding interests, which Taney represented in the most destructive way in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
Taney was a Catholic, and he reportedly believed that slavery was wrong. He manumitted slaves that he had inherited. But in the Dred Scott case, he threw the weight of the Court behind the Slave Power.
The case involved a slave suing for his freedom, contending that because his master had brought him to live in a territory in which slavery was not legal, he was made legally free by that residence. The decision denied Scott's appeal on the grounds that he was not a citizen of the United States and therefore had no grounds on which to appeal to the federal courts. "A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a 'citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States." That was bad enough. But the language of the decision went far beyond that:
The act of Congress, therefore, prohibiting a citizen of the United States from taking with him his slaves when he removes to the Territory in question to reside, is an exercise of authority over private property which is not warranted by the Constitutionand the removal of the plaintiff, by his owner, to that Territory, gave him no title to freedom.
Regulating slavery in the territories had been an accepted power of the national government even in the days of the Articles of Confederation. It had formed the basis of the various compromises in Congress which had until then prevented the slavery controversy from breaking out into secession and war. The Dred Scott decision destroyed the legal basis for further compromises of that kind.
In the context of Lost Cause dogma, this decision is also important because it was an exercise of national power on behalf of slavery. During the 1850s especially, when the Slave Power controlled the Presidency, the federal judiciary and much of the Congress, they were happy to use federal power to overrule "states rights" in defense of slavery. Given the choice between defending slavery and the abstract principle of "states rights," the slaveowners always chose defending slavery.
Abraham Lincoln, in a speech of June 26, 1857, attacking the Dred Scott decision, cited Andy Jackson in criticizing the decision. In that speech, Lincoln denounces the parts of Justice Taney's decision that argue that the Declaration of Independence never meant to include black people as even theoretically equal to whites:
In those days [of the Revolution], our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thoughtto include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him [the negro]. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred dfferent and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.
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