Dred Scott Constitutional Or Political Essay
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Dred Scott v. Sanford, which Abraham Lincoln called "an astonisher in legal history" remains to this day the most famous of all American judicial decisions. It was a landmark in the history of judicial review because it was the Supreme Court's first invalidation of a major federal law. The decision, in fact, provided an early indication of the vast judicial power that could be generated if political issues were converted, by definition into constitutional questions. It could be maintained that Dred Scott v. Sanford was used to parlay into a larger issue [the Missouri Compromise] for political effect. I believe that this was definitely the case and judging by the evidence, will seek to show that Chief Justice Taney was the instrument for this political conveyance, and dissenting opinions were overlooked in favor of the political scheme at hand. Furthermore, the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford would have remained small but innocuous except for the political machinations of Taney and other prominent figures.Taney used the United States Constitution for the political benefit of the current party and ironically, to bring peace to the issue of slavery. Taney hoped the court's decision would settle once and for all the question of slavery in the territories. Seldom in history has one man made a more dangerous miscalculation. For twenty-five years, the rights and wrongs of slavery had been debated both in and out of Congress with steadily growing bitterness. Instead of settling the question, the Supreme Court's decision on Dred Scott aroused the people's bitterness that slavery's fate could be settled only by war. The Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court in March 1857 was one of the major steps on the road to secession. Dred Scott was a slave who was taken to Missouri from Virginia and sold. His new master then moved to Illinois (a free state) and then to the free territory of Wisconsin. He lived on free soil for a long period of time, but moved back to Missouri when his master was transferred back by the Army. Upon his master's death, Scott claimed that since he had resided in a free state, he was consequentially a free man. The case eventually made it to the Supreme Court. Although Scott is the plaintiff in several cases or continuances, for the purposes of this essay we will assume that it is recognized that it is the Supreme Court's ruling on Scott v. Sanford which claimed controversial fame as this was the final ruling by the Supreme Court. The original questions that faced the Court were: 1) Was the plea in abatement before the Court? 2) Was Dred Scott a citizen of Missouri and thus capable of bringing a suit in a federal court? 3) Was Scott free as a consequence of his residence in Illinois? 4) Was Scott free as a consequence of his residence at Fort Snelling? There were two relatively simple solutions that would have avoided the thornier questions of the Missouri Compromise. One would have been to answer the first question in the affirmative and the second question in the negative, thereby reversing the lower court's ruling against the plea in abatement, and causing the case to be dismissed for want of jurisdiction. Excluding free Negroes from citizenship would no doubt have aroused anger in abolitionist circles, but not among the great majority of Northerners who equated black skins with natural inferiority. The Court, however, was so evenly divided on the status of the plea in abatement that an effective decision probably could not be reached in this manner. The other solution, equally simple and even less controversial, was that the Court could simply uphold the decision of the lower court. The Strader doctrine, in which Taney himself had added a proslavery dictum to a ruling that the Court lacked jurisdiction, could have provided a basis for returning negative answers to both the third and fourth questions. It should be recognized that when the Supreme Court first adjourned to discuss the case on February 14, 1857, it did favor a moderate decision that ruled in favor of Sanford, but did not consider the larger issues of Negro citizenship and the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise. It is documented that Justice Catron, an old friend of President Buchanan, was in correspondence with the President. President Buchanan was seeking an instrument for peace within the nation and believed that the Dred Scott case could be the key if used for larger measures. On February 3, Buchanan wrote to Catron ostensibly to know only if the Court would hand down a decision before Inauguration Day, so that he could take it into account. Catron replied that as yet no decision had been made, but he thought Buchanan was entitled to the information and would keep him informed. The implications of this exchange were plain enough: only a decision on the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise restriction could be of any importance to Buchanan in preparing his inaugural. In what must have been disappointing news for Buchanan on February 10, Catron wrote to him revealing that the Court would probably not pass judgment on the power of Congress over slavery in the territories. Instead, the majority had chosen Justice Nelson as the writer of the decision. Nelson carefully avoided these important but highly controversial issues, and "this the Dred Scott decision that almost was, began with an equitable summary of the opposing views on the plea in abatement." Tactfully, as the spokesman of the Court, Nelson left the issues open, saying only, "In the view we have taken of the case, it will not be necessary to pass on this question." He wrote a short opinion of about five thousand words, which included that "the laws of each [state], have no extraterritorial operation within the jurisdiction of another, except such as may be voluntarily conceded by her laws or courts of justice." When Nelson presented his opinion to the majority, however, he found that his "majority" opinion turned out to be the opinion of only himself. The Court elected to throw out Nelson's decision and instead chose Chief Justice Taney as the writer of the true majority opinion for the court. This opinion would include everything heretofore mentioned in regards to the larger controversial issues at hand and would be the one that remained forever in history. Catron wrote again to Buchanan, indicating the reversal of the Court and that the Court would render a decision on the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise restriction. The inaugural address, he added, might therefore include a passage leaving the whole matter with the "appropriate tribunal" and declining to "express any opinion on the subject." Also included in his letter to Buchanan was his reasoning for the Court's turnaround. The Court majority, he asserted, had been "forced up" to its change of plan by the determination of Justice Curtis and Justice McLean to present extensive dissenting opinions discussing all aspects of the case. Chief Taney then took matters into his own hands and began writing the opinion that would be forever be documented as the final analysis of the Dred Scott case. It contained several points that I feel need to be examined separately in order to understand where his reasoning might have been founded. He looked towards both the textual and historical modalities of the United States Constitution to base his opinion in addition to his own bias. To begin with, Taney basically took up the Negro citizenship issue largely on his own initiative. There was no significant political or public clamor for its resolution, and yet Taney devoted some forty percent of his entire opinion to it. Unlike the territorial issue, it was not a storm center for controversy. According to several texts, one reason for his persistence in this strategy was to utilize the opportunity to reaffirm what he had written twenty-five years earlier about the status of Negroes in American society. As Jackson's attorney general, he had prepared an official (but unpublished) opinion declaring that the African race was "a degraded class" not intended to be embraced in any provisions of the Constitution except those dealing with slavery. This doctrine went far beyond the issue raised by the Dred Scott case; for it excluded Negroes, whether free or slave, from all rights guaranteed in the Constitution. Yet Taney found that he could use the Dred Scott case to vindicate his extreme views at length and graft them authoritatively into American constitutional law. It is unsure whether Taney considered that the ruling in circuit court by Judge Wells that upheld Scott's right to bring suit in a federal court posed a potential threat to the Fugitive Slave Law. However, he was determined to meet every threat to southern stability by separating the Negro race absolutely from the federal Constitution and all the rights that it bestowed, thus leaving the states in complete control of black men, whether free or slave. The breadth with which he treated the issue of Negro citizenship reveals the true purpose of Judge Taney's Dred Scott opinion- to use his Court as an opportunity to launch a sweeping counterattack on the antislavery movement and settle the larger issues at hand within the political arena.The question before the Court, it should be remembered, was whether Dred Scott, if he were a free Negro, could be regarded as a citizen of Missouri, at least to the extent of being eligible to bring suit in a federal court under the diverse-citizenship clause. However, Taney did not return to the diverse-citizenship clause until much later in his opinion. For Taney, it was not enough to settle such a limited issue, and his opening paragraph of his opinion redefined the whole problem:The question is simply this: Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen. One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution. The difference between the two approaches is startling. Taney in this passage shifted the ground of inquiry from state citizenship to federal citizenship, and he made the right to bring suit in federal courts dependent upon the confirmation of all rights enjoyed under the federal Constitution. The effect was to prejudice Scott's cause and at the same time clear the way for the broad conclusions that Taney seemed determined to reach. However, in this introduction, Taney's argument is a little muddles as in the next paragraph he appears to be interpreting it again as a question of state rather than federal citizenship. Having asserted that the question was whether a Negro of slave ancestry could be a member of the "political community" created by the federal Constitution, Taney continues with the following restatement. The issue before the Court, he wrote, was "whether the descendents of such slaves, when they shall be emancipated, or who are born of parents who had become free before their birth, are citizens of the State, in the sense in which the word 'citizen' is used in the Constitution of the United States." After this somewhat contradictory beginning, Taney apparently felt an obligation to explain a troublesome parallel. The American Indians, though not generally included in the "political community" of the United States and, indeed, "under subjection to the white race" had nevertheless in some instances been admitted to federal citizenship. Why, then, would this not apply to freed slaves and their descendants? Chief Taney explained that the Indian tribes were in law equivalent to foreign nations and as such, were by virtue of the federal constitution's authority to naturalize foreigners. The paradox of why this should apply to Indian tribes and not American aborigines thoroughly escaped Taney. Chief Justice Taney then announced that he was ready to examine the case as presented by the pleadings. What came next illustrates his tendency towards repetition for emphasis:The words "people of the United States" and "citizens" are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the "sovereign people," and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The gross inaccuracy of the final clause is readily apparent. A large majority of American citizens-namely, women and children-were not members of the sovereign people in the sense of holding power and conducting the government through their representatives. Moreover, when the Constitution was put first into effect, many adult male citizens had been barred from constituent membership by property and religious qualifications for voting. Citizenship and sovereign power were far from synonymous. For the third time in two pages, Taney stated the question under consideration, returning to his original emphasis on national citizenship:The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty. We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at...
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