“Beings of an Inferior Order”

This chapter discusses the role of the legal system, including the Supreme Court, in upholding the constitutionality of slavery. It first examines the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842, in which the Supreme Court reversed the conviction in state court of Edward Prigg, a professional slave-catcher, for kidnapping Margaret Morgan, who escaped from slavery in Maryland to the free state of Pennsylvania. Ruling that state officials could not hinder enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the Court also held that state officials could decline to aid slave-catchers, leading to mass demonstrations in Boston over the “rendition” of escaped slaves George Latimer and Anthony Burns. The chapter includes a recounting of the infamous Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney held that no Black person was a citizen and that Blacks were “an inferior order of beings” who had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of the impact of the Dred Scott ruling on the presidential campaign of 1860, in which Abraham Lincoln denounced the decision and provoked the slave states to secede from the Union and launch the Civil War.

Wages of Whiteness

The Dred Scott decision (1857) sought to enshrine white supremacy in constitutional law and vanquish the antislavery activists who opposed Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis’s Democratic Party. Nevertheless, the Davis-Douglas rivalry intensified in the late 1850s. Racism and anti-abolitionism were flimsy foundations for party unity because they could not resolve the tension between Douglas’s majoritarianism and Davis’s dedication to slaveholders’ property rights. This conflict exploded into intraparty war in 1858 as Democrats debated the admission of Kansas as a state under the proslavery Lecompton Constitution. Embraced by Davis and like-minded Democrats for safeguarding property rights, the Lecompton Constitution was assailed by Douglas and his allies as a perversion of popular sovereignty. After clashing over Lecompton in the Senate, Davis and Douglas had to defend themselves back home. Davis veered toward more extreme positions on reopening the Atlantic slave trade and passing federal legislation to protect slavery in western territories. Meanwhile, Douglas ran for re-election against Abraham Lincoln, a formidable foe who forced him to prove that popular sovereignty could produce free states. By 1859, Democrats’ efforts to win state and local elections exacerbated their party’s internal sectional conflict.

Law and Liberty, 1830–1860

This chapter examines the rise of radical abolitionism in the 1820s and 1830s as well as the emergence of the Colored Convention movement in the North that challenged slavery and discrimination against free blacks. African Americans as well as white abolitionists developed an interpretation of the Constitution that employed republicanism, due process of law, and equal citizenship to challenge slavery and discrimination. With the acquisition of vast territories in the Southwest from Mexico in the late 1840s, many northerners feared that slavery would expand and strengthen southern political power. New political groups, notably the Republican Party, grew in strength and embraced antislavery constitutional ideas. A southern-dominated Supreme Court responded in the Dred Scott case, ruling that African Americans were not citizens and that Congress lacked authority to exclude slavery from the territories. Republican victory in 1860 signaled the triumph of antislavery constitutional ideas and precipitated secession.