Dred Scott Case Research Articles

The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law.

The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law.

‘The Right to Enter Every Other State’ – The Supreme Court and African American Mobility in the United States

In 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated in the Dred Scott case that if one African American was free to move unhindered throughout the United States, then all African Americans, enslaved or otherwise, would have ‘the right to enter every other State’. Such a situation, he argued, was untenable. The Supreme Court thus suggested that if U.S. citizenship included a de facto right to mobility, then African Americans could not be considered citizens. Although not formally written into the U.S. Constitution, numerous Supreme Court rulings since 1857 have underpinned the right to mobility in the United States. Yet the ability to be mobile in the United States has been fundamentally intertwined with the construction of racial identities. It was the white settlers that were free to move westward, the mobile nomadic lifestyles of the peoples they encountered being understood as primitive and inferior. Native peoples subsequently became immobilized on reservations. Similarly, African Americans in the era of slavery were immobilized on plantations and movement away from plantation space was illicit, codified as illegal, and required the hidden networks of the Underground Railroad. An African American moving through white American spaces faced often deadly consequences. African Americans should, in the parlance of the times, ‘know their place’ and not have the ambition, or the right, to move freely around the USA. To explore these contentions, I draw on four landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that elaborate on the mobility, or curtailment thereof, of African Americans in the United States.

Critical Race Theory and Racialized Law: an Application of an African American Full Professor’s Federal Case Involving Race Discrimination at a Predominately White University

Using Bonilla-Silva’s sociological theory of racism and critical race theory, this article reports how racism within the legal system manifested itself against an African American full professor who sued a predominately White university for racial discrimination. First, this article provides background on racism in the law, discussing the Dred Scott case and Plessy v. Ferguson—two historical race cases. Moreover, this article discusses how the legal system in the past instructed juries to take race into account in deciding interracial cases. Then, it presents the current legal standard to decide race discrimination cases and how a White federal judge, who is a law school graduate of the White university being sued, ignored the standard and all the African American’s evidence to produce a favorable outcome for the White university. Moreover, a White federal magistrate, who also got her law degree from the White university and teaches at the law school part time, assisted the federal judge by not ruling on a key motion to access the dean’s computers, permitting the federal judge to rule this computer issue moot. In conclusion, support is provided for both Bonilla-Silva theory and critical race theory.

Strader v. Graham: Kentucky's Contribution to National Slavery Litigation the the Dred Scott Decision

In 1841, three Kentucky slaves in Louisville boarded a steamboat bound for Cincinnati. Within days, they had made their way to Detroit and then to permanent freedom in Canada. Their owner, a prominent central Kentucky businessman, soon tracked them down and tried to lure them back to bondage in the United States. When these efforts failed, he sued the steamboat owners for the value of the lost slaves in a Kentucky court. After ten years of litigation, this case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court’s decision in favor of the Kentucky slaveholder would prove to be an important precedent a few years later when the Court considered the freedom claim of another slave, Dred Scott, whose case would produce perhaps the most important decision ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court.The key issue in Dred Scott - how, if at all, a Negro slave could obtain his freedom by spending time on free soil - had also been considered by the Court in prior cases. This Article deals with one of these, Strader v. Graham, 51 U.S. 82 (1851), the case brought by the Kentucky businessman whose slaves escaped on the defendants’ steamboat and the only Kentucky slave case ever to reach the Supreme Court.This Article provides a detailed description of Strader, including its factual background, its reflection of Kentucky slave law in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its significance for Dred Scott and other subsequent slave-related matters. Part I provides an overview of Kentucky slave law as it evolved up to the time of the Strader litigation. Part II describes Strader’s factual background and the Kentucky court decisions it produced. Part III covers the Strader case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Part IV deals with post-Strader events, including a review of the Dred Scott case and the role that the Strader decision played in that litigation. Part V provides some concluding observations about how the Strader case reflected the role of slavery, law, and lawyers in antebellum Kentucky and what Strader and Dred Scott might teach us in the modern era.

Letters

This book provides informationfor local histo rians and could be a handy reference for schools, museums, and historical societies. FrancisDrake in Nehalem Bay 1579:Setting the Historical Record Straight byGarry D. Gitzen Isnik Publishing, Wheeler, Oregon, 2008. Illustrations, photographs, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 255 pages. $59-95 cloth. $39-95 paper. This book challengesthebelief thatFrancisDrake landedhis GoldenHinde inCalifornia in 1579by arguing thathewas actually in Oregon's Nehalem Bay. The author explores surveying, navigation, geology,ethnology, geography, and cartographyto put forthhis premise thatFrancisDrake was the first European to interact culturally, spiritually and physically with PacificNorthwest coast Indians. Skeena River Fish and TheirHabitat byAllen S.Gottesfeld and Ken A. Rabnett forewordby JimLichatowich Ecotrust, Portland, Oregon, 2008. Photographs, maps, tables, bibliography, index. 352 pages. $29.95 paper. Allen Gottesfeld, head scientist for the Skeena Fisheries Commission, and Ken Rabnett, a fish eries researcher, have both been residents of the Skeena watershed for over twenty-five years. In thisbook, theyshareextensiveknowledge of the river and its fish, focusing on the freshwater part of thesalmon lifecycle intheireffort to shed light on this stillpoorly understood watershed. The SkeenaRiver is thesecond largestriversystemin BritishColumbia and one of the most productive salmon rivers inNorth America. Images of America: West Linn by Cornelia Becker Seigneur Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, SC, 2008. Photographs, bibliography, index. 128pages. $21.99 paper. This new pictorial historyof West Linn includes more than 200 vintage photographs. Many of the photographs have never before been pub lished, including those of thefirstfairprincess; theoriginal City Hall built in 1936, which now houses the police station; and thehistoric fire department.Although an 1861fire, then flood, destroyedwhat was originallyLinn City, the site at Willamette Falls continued drawing industry, and West Linn, known for its hills, trees, rivers, and famous meteorite unearthed in 1902, was incorporated into Oregon in 1913. Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders: The Labour ofPioneer Children on theCanadian Prairies by Sandra Rollings-Magnusson The University ofAlberta Press, Edmonton, 2009. Pho tographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 192pages. $34-95 paper. Only a century ago on the Canadian prairies, young people labored alongside theirparents working the land, chopping wood, and doing othernecessary chores,all the while learningthe domesticandmanual laborskills needed forlife on a family farm. The author uses historic research, photographs, and personal anecdotes to describe thekindsofwork performedby childrenand how thesetasksfitintothefamilyeconomy.The book contributes to the study of western Canadian his tory as well as family and gender studies. _LETTERS To theEditor: It is surprisingthatBarbaraMahoney inher articleon the slaveryissue in theOregon State hood contest chose to completely ignore the Dred Scott case. The case was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in early 1857at theheight of the debate, and ithad a direct impacton the issues before Oregon voters and their representatives. According toCharles H. Carey (General History ofOregon, p. 505), "The effect of thedecision as 650 OHQ vol. 110, no. 4 applied toOregon was everywhere debated inthat Territory." But Mahoney's analysis is completely silent on the subject. Briefly, Dred Scottwas the slave of anArmy doctor who took him from Missouri, a slave state, to awestern territory. Slavery was prohibited here by the Missouri Compromise, the law that made thenorth half of theLouisiana Purchase except for Missouri freeof slavery. Then Scott and his master went to Illinois, which was a free state, and finally back to Missouri. The doctor soldhim and Scott sued the new owner in federal court, claiming thatlivingintheterritory and inIllinois hadmade him free. The court found againsthim and Scott appealed. Chief Justice Taney,writing fortheU.S. Supreme Court, held thatScottmay have been free while he was in Illinois but this didn't make him a U.S. citizen. When he came back to Missouri, hewas subject to Missouri law, which consideredhim a slaveagain.And he didn't become freeby being in the territory, because Congress had no power to take a slave owner's propertywithout due process of law.Thus the Missouri Compromise was nullified. Actually, the so called "squatter sovereignty" doctrinehad alreadyreplaced the Missouri Com promise. The Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854had decreed thatthe slaveryissuewould be decided ineachTerritory by a vote of theresidents. Chief Justice Taney doesn't mention it,but his logic apparently wiped away thatpossible restraint on the spread of slavery also. The decision posed...

Race and the Shaping of U.S. Immigration Policy

The date is October 13, 2004, some 147 years after Chief Justice Roger Taney and the infamous Dred Scott case. Representing the United States government, Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler, stands before the United States Supreme Court and tells the Court that the nation needs to protect its borders and in doing so some noncitizens must be treated as if they have no rights to due process.1 At issue is the ultimate fate of over 1000 persons of color, Mariel Cubans held in federal custody nearly 25 years after the boatlift. Two of the Cuban detainees have been incarcerated for 19 years. A total of 33 aliens have waited in jail for more than 15 years to be deported. Justice Souter grills Solicitor General Kneedler about the legal “fiction” of pretending that Mariel Cubans, who have been here for a quarter-century, have no more rights than immigrants showing up at the border: “That fiction of exclusion can’t be used for constitutional purposes, can it? . . . You have a due process clause that says ‘persons,’ not ‘citizens’ are entitled to constitutional protections?” Justice John Paul Stevens continues the questioning of Kneedler by asking “how far the government would carry the ‘no rights’ argument?” “Can we kill them?” he asks.2

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857

The Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision denied citizenship to African Americans and enabled slavery's westward expansion. It has long stood as a grievous instance of justice perverted by sectional politics. Austin Allen finds that the outcome of Dred Scott hinged not on a single issue - slavery - but on a web of assumptions, agendas, and commitments held collectively and individually by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and his colleagues. Allen carefully tracks arguments made by Taney Court justices in more than 1,600 reported cases in the two decades prior to Dred Scott and in its immediate aftermath. By showing us the political, professional, ideological, and institutional contexts in which the Taney Court worked, Allen reveals that Dred Scott was not simply a victory for the Court's prosouthern faction. It was instead an outgrowth of Jacksonian jurisprudence, an intellectual system that charged the Court with protecting slavery, preserving both federal power and state sovereignty, promoting economic development, and securing the legal foundations of an emerging corporate order - all at the same time. Here is a wealth of new insight into the internal dynamics of the Taney Court and the origins of its most infamous decision.

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (review)

Reviewed by: Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 Keith E. Whittington Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857. By Austin Allen . ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Pp. 288. Cloth $59.95; paper $22.95.) In the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the justices barred Congress from prohibiting slavery in the western territories and sought to end the growing turmoil that had already torn apart the Whig party and launched the Republican party. Austin Allen has found a new and intriguing angle on the infamous Dred Scott case. Allen seeks to place Dred Scott "in its judicial context," in the context of the ideas, concerns, and bodies of law that the Supreme Court had been building up over several decades, rather than in the more familiar and immediate context of the sectional and partisan politics of 1857. It is in the latter context that Republicans at the time, including Abraham Lincoln, cast the decision, and it is in that context that the decision has stood as an example of misguided and unwarranted "judicial activism." Allen does not go so far as to argue that this externalist account is irrelevant, but he aptly demonstrates the power of an internalist account that filters political considerations through the web of law. In particular, Allen shows the connections between Dred Scott and the Court's developing jurisprudence relating to slavery, economic development, and the jurisdiction of the federal courts. In many ways, Allen argues, the Court's difficulty began with its decision in Swift v. Tyson in 1842. Swift concerned the choice of law to be applied in diversity cases, cases that entered the federal court system because they involved parties from more than one state. Beginning with Swift, the justices developed an increasingly robust federal common law that trumped relevant state law in the cases that were decided in federal court. There was a substantial attraction in this development for the commercial cases with which Swift was primarily concerned, but it created at least two difficulties. In order to trigger federal diversity jurisdiction under the U.S. [End Page 415] Constitution, the parties to the lawsuit must be citizens from different states. Corporations, artificial entities created by state law, were at best analogous to citizens, but if they were going to be efficiently and effectively brought under the protective umbrella of federal diversity jurisdiction they would have to be given "quasi-citizen" status by the Court (130). But if corporations could be recognized as a kind of citizen entitled to federal rights and access to federal courts, Southern justices well recognized, then free blacks might as well. In the context of commercial law, the Taney Court was willing to trump state policies so as to facilitate the development of a national and vibrant commercial republic. In the context of slavery and social policy generally, however, the Court wanted to defer to local law in most circumstances. The Missouri courts had ruled that Dred Scott was a slave, despite the time he had spent in free territory, and under other circumstances the Taney Court would defer to Missouri's judgment and easily dismiss the case. Dred Scott's lawyer, however, hoped to take advantage of the loophole created by the Court's diversity jurisdiction. If Dred Scott's case could be heard under diversity jurisdiction, then the federal courts could not simply defer to the state courts. They would have to hear such cases and rule on them independently. In Allen's telling, the Dred Scott case is the Taney Court's effort to close that loophole by denying that blacks could be citizens, or quasi-citizens, and forcing them into state courts for whatever disposition state law would provide. Ironically, Dred Scott would then be a case in which the Supreme Court was trying to avoid future entanglements with the slavery issue, rather than a case in which the Court was trying to impose a final (proslavery) solution. This is an inventive and provocative thesis (suggesting, for example, that Dred Scott would allow territorial legislatures, but not Congress, to prohibit slavery...

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857

AUSTIN ALLEN. Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857. (Studies in the Legal History of the South.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2006. Pp. x, 274. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.95

AUSTIN ALLEN. Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857. (Studies in the Legal History of the South.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2006. Pp. x, 274. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.95

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (review)

Reviewed by: Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857 Kyle G. Volk (bio) Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857. By Austin Allen. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Pp. 274. Cloth, $59.95; Paper, $22.95.) Austin Allen provides us with a new way to understand why United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney notoriously ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that black Americans were not citizens of the United States and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories. He suggests that our dominant interpretations, which characterize (and condemn) Taney's opinion as a work of sectional partisanship and judicial overreaching, have too closely followed the partisan Republican critique that emerged in the decision's immediate aftermath. As a result, scholars have not taken seriously other reasons why Taney issued a ruling that today strikes us as so morally problematic. Rather than seeing the decision as a judicial response to an external crisis over slavery, Allen argues that Taney's opinion was as much a product of the court resolving its own internal crisis. Allen situates Dred Scott within the doctrinal web that the Taney Court created in the previous twenty years, and he makes a solid case that Taney's ruling was an unintended consequence of a court divided by a number of issues, only one of which was slavery and some of which are surprising. This book makes an important contribution not only to our understanding of Dred Scott but also to our knowledge of the Taney Court and its relationship to antebellum American society. Allen's work comprises nine chapters arranged in three sections. The first two sections unearth the contexts he sees as vital to understanding [End Page 511] Taney's ruling, while the third discusses Dred Scott as shaped by these contexts. One of the strengths of Allen's work is his treatment of the Taney Court as an institution with an identity, and in the first section he lays out the ideological and cultural conditions shaping the court and its jurisprudence. Though attentive to the internal dissent that made the Taney Court far less unified than the Marshall Court, Allen exposes how Taney Court members—many of them partisan Democrats—collectively wrestled with the court's role in a legal and political system predicated on popular sovereignty. Allen suggests that the court conceived of itself as a facilitator of self-rule, and he distills two general manifestations. First, in constitutional cases the court strove to balance its general deference to state legislatures with the protection of the supremacy of federal authority. Second, in private law cases the court displayed concern for social order in a self-governing society and applied common-law rules to compel individuals to stand by market obligations. These two broad commitments collided in Swift v. Tyson (1842), a case that came to the court through its diversity jurisdiction by which it was authorized to hear cases involving parties from different states. In Swift, the court, led by Joseph Story, issued a highly nationalistic ruling that invented a federal common law of commerce to guide its adjudication of commercial disputes between citizens of different states. Though Swift did not involve slavery, Allen shows that it carried clear antislavery implications. It inaugurated a new trend in which the court would be less deferential to state policy and state court opinions in diversity suits. When Dred Scott reached the court through diversity jurisdiction, it was difficult for the court simply to defer to the Missouri Supreme Court that ruled that Scott remained a slave despite having traveled in free territory. Developments in diversity begun in Swift pushed the court to a more substantive ruling in Dred Scott. Allen's second section contains his most interesting contributions. First, he details the conflict-ridden development of the court's method of handling cases involving slavery outside of diversity jurisdiction. This method, which matured in Strader v. Graham (1851), was to defer to state law by asserting a lack of jurisdiction. Commentators have puzzled over why Taney opted for such a broad ruling in Dred Scott...

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857

When considering Roger B. Taney, one has to confront the contrast between the justice who wrote the Charles River Bridge opinion in 1837 and the justice who wrote the opinion in the Dred Scott case twenty years later. Austin Allen proposes that Taney's modernizing, pro-corporate attitudes shaped his arguments about slavery, and that this explains the ruling in the Dred Scott case. In making his argument, Allen seeks to move beyond what he calls the “orthodoxy” that focuses on the sectional divide over slavery. Instead, Allen wants to present the case as an expression of developing legal doctrine rather than of extrajudicial politics. This is old-fashioned court-centered legal history, and Allen presents a reading of Taney's opinion that is at least charitable, and, at points, downright sympathetic. To carry out his project, Allen develops jurisprudential portraits of the various justices involved in the case, based on his review of more than sixteen hundred reported cases between 1837 and 1861. Taney's view, in Allen's telling, had two crucial components by the 1850s: First, an “amoral” view of judicial authority (p. 18) grounded in a genuine commitment to popular sovereignty, and second, a commercially oriented concept of control, by which the Taney court “regularly coerced litigants into tightly governing themselves and their subordinates” (p. 11).

The Dred Scott Dissents: McLean, Curtis, Lincoln, and the Public Mind

The Dred Scott Dissents: McLean, Curtis, Lincoln, and the Public Mind LUCAS E. MOREL Then what is necessary for the nationalization of slavery? It is simply the next Dred Scott decision. Abraham Lincoln, 1858 The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world. Frederick Douglass, 1857 Late in his Supreme Court career, Justice Thurgood Marshall posed a perennial question to potential law clerks: “Do you like writing dissents? Ifyou don’t, baby, this is not the of­ fice for you.”1 The two dissents in the most notorious Supreme Court case in American history, Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford, if one considers only their length, appear to have been written with equal relish; the day after Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read his opin­ ion for the Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford,2 Justices John McLean and Benjamin Curtis read their dissents, taking five hours to do so. On March 6,1857, ChiefJustice Roger B. Taney, just shy of his eightieth birthday, read in a barely audible voice the opinion of the Court. Taney ruled that Scott was not a citizen of Missouri and therefore could not sue a citi­ zen of another state to bring the case into fed­ eral court. Why? Because he was black and a descendant of slaves: According to Taney, blacks “are not included, and were not in­ tendedto be included, underthe word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citi­ zens of the United States.”3 Taney claimed that in the eyes of “the civilized portion of the white race” during the founding era, blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”4 In addition, Taney held that the 1820 Missouri Compromise law banning slav­ ery from the Northwest Territory was an un­ constitutional exercise of power by Congress, which is prohibited by the Fifth Amendment 134 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process oflaw.” This de­ cision in Dred Scott marked only the second time the high court had overturned a federal law. The great debate overthis latterruling cen­ ters on the Court’s decision to go on to discuss the substantive merits ofthe case, forifthey de­ termined that Scott was not a citizen under the Constitution, then neither the Supreme Court nor the federal circuit court hadjurisdiction to hear the case. The case should have been dis­ missed and Scott would have remained a slave under the 1852 Missouri Supreme Court deci­ sion inScottv. Emerson. This was the argument Justice Samuel Nelson offered when he was originally assigned to write the official opinion of the Court; however, pressure from influen­ tial Southerners behind the scenes eventually steered a majority of the Court to have Chief Justice Taney write the official opinion.5 More on Taney later. Now for the loyal opposition. Abraham Lincoln called the case “an astonisher in legal history” for the claim by his nemesis Stephen Douglas that the deci­ sion should be viewed immediately as set­ tled law, receiving “a degree of sacredness that has never been before thrown around any other decision.”6 The controversy stirred up by the Dred Scott case provided an occa­ sion for the public to think through the role of the Supreme Court in the nation’s gov­ ernance: Specifically, to what extent should any of its decisions become “the political rule” for the other federal branches of gov­ ernment and therewith the American people?7 While commentators across the political spec­ trum, north and south of the Mason-Dixon line, weighed in with their affirmations or denigrations of the Dred Scott ruling, it was former Congressman and wannabe Senator Lincoln who drew from Justice Curtis’s dis­ sent to set the terms of public debate over the future of slavery in America—which to Lincoln’s mind was all about the future of self-government. So let us consider Lincoln an honorary “third” dissenter in the case, and in­ clude his “dissent” in our consideration ofthe case. First, let us briefly fill out the...

Origins of the Dred Scott case: Jacksonian jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857

Origins of the Dred Scott case: Jacksonian jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857

Justice Curtis in the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism

Through this biography of Benjamin R. Curtis, Stuart Streichler aspires to “present a constitutional history of the Civil War era” (p. xi). A preeminent constitutional lawyer, Curtis also served six years as a justice of the Supreme Court, resigning in 1857. Introducing his book's seven chapters and conclusion, Streichler argues the centrality of constitutional issues to the Civil War, echoing the view common among legal analysts that the era marked a turning point in American constitutionalism. An initial chapter places Curtis within a sketchily outlined “Whig tradition.” In each of the other chapters, Streichler addresses a different constitutional topic linked to a case or controversy in which Curtis was involved. In this manner he discusses Curtis's role in delineating state and federal power in the federal system, the rendition of fugitive slaves, the origins of “substantive” process of law, the Dred Scott case, the debate over the extent of presidential war powers, and the defense of President Andrew Johnson in the impeachment trial of 1868. Curtis played a leading part in all these controversies, setting the framework for debate and in some cases establishing principles that are still fundamental today.

Justice Curtis in the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism

During a career as both a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, Benjamin R. Curtis addressed practically every major constitutional question of the mid-nineteenth century, making judgments that still resonate in American law. Aside from a family memoir written by his brother over one hundred years ago, however, no book-length treatment of Curtis exists. Now Stuart Streichler has filled this gap in judicial biography, using Curtis's life and work as a window on the most serious constitutional crisis in American history, the Civil War. Curtis was the lead attorney for President Andrew Johnson in the Senate's impeachment trial, where he delivered the pivotal argument, and his was an influential voice in the pervasive constitutional struggle between states and the federal government. He is best remembered, however, for dissenting in the Dred Scott case, in which he disputed Chief Justice Taney's proslavery ruling that no black person could ever become a citizen of the United States. In the wake of the decision, Curtis resigned from the court, the only justice in the Supreme Court's history to do so on grounds of principle. Yet he also clashed with Boston's abolitionists over enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, and he opposed the Emancipation Proclamation. In a period when the Constitution was radically transformed from a charter that protected slavery to one that granted all persons equal rights of citizenship, Justice Curtis maintained his faith in the Constitution as an adaptable instrument of self-government and tried to mark out a path for gradual change. Streichler assesses Curtis's common-law methods in the context of his divisive times and shows how the judge's views continue to shed light on issues that have become once again relevant, such as the presidential impeachment process and, after 9/11, the use of military tribunals to try civilians.

The Dred Scott case

The Dred Scott case

The Dred Scott Case

The Dred Scott Case

Washington University Acquires Lost Documents from the Dred Scott Case

Washington University Acquires Lost Documents from the Dred Scott Case

The Dred Scott Case Reconsidered: The Legal and Political Context in Missouri

Journal Article The Dred Scott Case Reconsidered: The Legal and Political Context in Missouri Get access Dennis K. Boman, Ph.D. in American history from the University of Missouri-Columbia Dennis K. Boman, Ph.D. in American history from the University of Missouri-Columbia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, Volume 44, Issue 4, October 2000, Pages 405–428, https://doi.org/10.2307/3113785 Published: 01 October 2000