Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [124]
Two days later, on March 6, the historic decision was read by the seventy-nine-year-old Taney in the old Supreme Court chamber, one flight below the Senate. The 7–2 decision was breathtaking in its scope and consequences. The Court ruled that blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” Therefore, Scott had no standing in federal court. This should have decided the case, but Taney went further. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution had been intended to apply to blacks, he said. Blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” But the Chief Justice did not stop even there; he went on to say that Congress had exceeded its authority when it forbade slavery in the territories by such legislation as the Missouri Compromise, for slaves were private property protected by the Constitution. In other words, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. The act itself, of course, had already been repealed by the Nebraska Act, meaning that the Court was pronouncing on an issue that was not before it.
One of the justices later asserted that Taney had “become convinced that it was practicable for the Court to quiet all agitation on the question of slavery in the territories by affirming that Congress had no constitutional power to prohibit its introduction.” But the fierce sectional conflict of the age, the question that had given birth to the Republican Party, could not be quieted by a divided judicial fiat. The Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter later said, was “one of the Court’s great self-inflicted wounds.”
Initially, the decision appeared to be a stunning victory for the South. For more than a decade, the Richmond Enquirer proclaimed, antislavery forces had claimed for the federal government the right of prescribing the boundaries of slavery in the territories. Now the territorial prize for which the two sides had “often wrestled in the halls of Congress, has been awarded at last, by the proper umpire, to those who have justly won it.” The decision of the Supreme Court, “the accredited interpreter of the Constitution and arbiter of disagreements between the several States,” the Enquirer continued, has destroyed “the foundation of the theory upon which their warfare has been waged against the institutions of the South.” Antislavery men were staggered, the Enquirer claimed, left “nonplused and bewildered, confounded and confused.”
“Sheer blasphemy,” Republicans responded. The ruling was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” The New York Tribune argued that the Supreme Court had forfeited its stature as “an impartial judicial body,” and predicted that its attempt to derail the Republican Party, which had come so close to victory in the previous presidential election, would fail. “Judge Taney can do many things,” Frederick Douglass observed, “but he cannot…change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good, evil.” Frances Seward hoped that the blatantly unethical decision would galvanize the national will of the North. It “has aroused many to the encroachments of the slave power,” she happily reported to Sumner.
The furor broke yet another bond of union by involving the Supreme Court, the common guarantor of both North and South, in sectional conflict. Dred Scott was sold to a Mr. Taylor Blow, who promptly freed him. He would die within a year, a free man whose name would leave a deeper mark on American history than those of the justices who had consigned him to slavery.
Speaking in Springfield, Lincoln attacked the decision in characteristic fashion, not by castigating the Court but by meticulously exposing flaws of logic. The Chief Justice, Lincoln said, “insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or