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Until the Dred Scott Decision, the controversy proceeded upon the idea that States and Territories were alike under the Constitution, and that by the Constitution slavery was neither authorized nor prohibited in any State, nor in any Territory of the Union.
When I went to England the first time, I formed a friendship with Lady Byron which led to a somewhat interesting correspondence. When there the second time, after the publication of "Dred" in 1856, Lady Byron wrote to me that she wished to have some private confidential conversation with me, and invited me to come spend a day with her at her country-seat near London.
In the case of Dartmouth College vs. New Hampshire was declared the unconstitutionally of a state law which impaired the obligation of contracts. A very important case decided by Chief Justice Taney was that of Dred Scott vs. Sandford in 1857. Dred Scott, a negro slave in Missouri, had been carried into the Territory of Minnesota, where, by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery did not exist.
The day after the inauguration the decision was announced. It was the celebrated Dred Scott case. It fell like a bomb into the antislavery camp. The great question involved was whether it was competent for Congress, directly or indirectly, to exclude slavery from the Territories of the United States. The Supreme Court decided that it was not. Six judges out of eight made this decision.
Leading churches throughout the South began to preach the doctrine that slavery is a divinely ordained institution, and by the time of the decision in the Dred Scott case a whole generation had grown up under such teaching. A large proportion of Southern leaders had become thoroughly convinced of the righteousness of their peculiar system.
They did not believe in the creed or the policies of the party, and feared the result of its administration of the National Government. Their views in regard to the Constitutional rights of the slave-holders were the same as those held by the Confederate chieftains. They had both concurred with Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision. But it was enough for them now to know that Mr.
So absolute have property rights been held by the Supreme Court, that it even, by the Dred Scott decision, in effect made the whole country a land of slavery, because the slave was property, and the rights of property were sacred."
In return he pressed upon Douglas his charge of a political conspiracy to nationalize slavery, alleging that his "don't care" policy was but the convenient stalking-horse under cover of which a new Dred Scott decision would make slavery lawful everywhere.
For the decision of the Supreme Court in the Giles case, if it foreshadows the attitude which the Court will take upon other cases to the same general end which will soon come before it, is scarcely less than a reaffirmation of the Dred Scott decision; it certainly amounts to this that in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States are bound to respect.
To this Lincoln replied that Republicans did not aim at abolition in the slave-States, but only the exclusion of slavery from free Territories; they did not oppose the Dred Scott decision in so far as it concerned the freedom of Dred Scott, but they refused to accept its dicta as rules of political action.
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