The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [61]
Abolitionists, who had pioneered an alternative reading of the Constitution based on a uniform national citizenship not limited by race, responded bitterly to the Dred Scott decision. James McCune Smith, a black physician, author, and antislavery activist, carefully dissected Taney’s reasoning, citing legal precedents going back to “the annals of lofty Rome” to demonstrate that all free persons born in the United States, black as well as white, “must be citizens.” Many Republicans agreed. Taney’s ruling on this issue was “villainously false,” declared the Cleveland Leader. The Republican legislatures of New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Ohio adopted resolutions recognizing black citizenship in their states, joining Massachusetts, where state courts had long affirmed this position. Maine’s legislators adopted a resolution declaring the decision “not binding, in law or in conscience, upon the government or citizens of the United States.” When the State Department in 1858 refused to issue a passport to the black physician John Rock of Boston on the grounds that he was not an American citizen, the Springfield Republican condemned the action as an insult to the entire state of Massachusetts.4
Republicans objected even more vociferously to Taney’s reversal of the “freedom national” doctrine. They accused the Supreme Court of making slavery the norm and freedom the exception, transforming the South’s “peculiar institution” into a national one that must exist everywhere it had not been prohibited by state law. The decision, they claimed, even threw into question whether states possessed the constitutional authority to prohibit slavery. The Supreme Court, declared John Murray Forbes, had “passed into the hands of the South, and…become simply a political body whose opinions deserve no more weight than those of any other sectional caucus of partisans.”5
The Dred Scott decision propelled to the forefront of public debate questions that would dominate politics until the outbreak of the Civil War: the founders’ intentions regarding slavery; whether slavery should be viewed as a local or national institution; and the constitutional authority of the federal government to prohibit slavery in the territories. Lincoln had already expressed his opinions on these issues and would continue to do so between 1857 and 1860. But the decision inspired him to elaborate his views on a subject about which he had previously said very little, the place of blacks in American society. Lincoln knew this question carried an explosive political charge. Soon after the Court issued its ruling, Stephen A. Douglas delivered impassioned speeches proclaiming that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution had been written for whites and charging that Republicans who opposed the Dred Scott decision favored “perfect and absolute equality of the races.” Lincoln believed that rhetoric of this kind had played a role in Frémont’s defeat in the presidential election of the previous November. Republicans, Lincoln wrote, had been “constantly charged with seeking an amalgamation of the white and black races; and thousands turned from us…fearing to face it themselves.” If others would not “face it,” he would.6
Lincoln later called Dred Scott a “burlesque upon judicial decisions.”7 On June 26, 1857, two weeks after Douglas spoke in Springfield in its support, Lincoln responded in the same city. The decision, he argued, was so erroneous that it could not be viewed as having established a “settled doctrine for the country.” Nearly all Republican leaders agreed. But unlike