Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

law that in any way interfered with a citizen’s “enjoyment” or use of his property—which in the case of John Emerson had been his slaves Dred and Harriet Scott. Taney then attacked the Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprived slaveholders of the use of their slave property north of the 36°30′ line. In two sentences he destroyed popular sovereignty, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas Nebraska bill as well, for if it was unconstitutional for Congress to ban slavery from the territories, it was equally unconstitutional for the federal territories to do it for themselves, no matter what the majority vote of a territory on the question might be.

The two sections of the Taney opinion, running over 250 tightly printed pages in the Court’s Reports, fit together as integral parts. The first reduced Dred Scott to a noncitizen, fit only to become some real citizen’s “property,” and the second denied the federal government any authority to restrain in any way the spread of slavery in any place where the federal government—as opposed to the individual state governments—had jurisdiction. In fact, only the states themselves were left by Taney with any constitutional authority to deal with slavery within their own borders, and even that might be the next safeguard to be questioned by a federal court.69

In terms of what the Dred Scott appeal actually required before the law, Taney need not have done more than declare that Scott simply had no standing before the Court. The explanation for the Taney’s decision to reach beyond Dred Scott himself and strike down the great compromises lies largely in Taney and his Court. Five of the seven justices who voted in the majority were Southerners. John A. Campbell, an Alabamian, would later serve as an assistant secretary of war in the Confederacy, and Robert Wayne Grier, John Catron, and Peter Daniel were all pro-slavery partisans. Taney himself was a Marylander (and brother-in-law of Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”) and an old Jacksonian Democrat who had served as Jackson’s attorney general in the successful effort to destroy the Bank of the United States. His opinion in Scott v. Sanford became Taney’s effort to settle the slavery question where Congress, the presidents, Clay, Webster, Taylor, and Wilmot had failed, and to settle it in favor of the South.

Far from settling the slavery question, Scott v. Sanford only aggravated it. The game of balances had gone far beyond the point where a simple declaration from the Court could end it. The new Republican Party replied that a decision so defective in constitutional logic and so repugnant to popular opinion could never be binding as law, and Abraham Lincoln denounced Taney’s attack on the natural right of blacks to freedom as a turning of the Declaration of Independence upside down. “Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all,” Lincoln declared, “but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not recognize it at all.”70 Meanwhile, Stephen A. Douglas was coming up for reelection to the Senate in 1858, and it was clear that the Illinois Republicans would be quick to challenge Douglas on how he could reconcile popular sovereignty—and the right of territories to vote slavery in or out according to their popular majorities—with Taney’s declaration that neither Congress nor a federal territory had the authority to ban the transportation of slaves to those territories.

President James Buchanan, relieved at not having to deliver an opinion on the slavery controversy himself, happily announced his full intention of applying the Dred Scott decision to the trouble in Kansas, and welcomed the application of the pro-slavery legislature for the admission of the Kansas Territory to the Union as a slave state.71

CHAPTER THREE

YEAR OF METEORS

It seems only human nature to hang the label irrational on what we do not understand, since it is easy for us to assume that something must be irrational if our ingenuity is unequal to the task of deciphering it. That may actually reflect more on the limits of our ingenuity than on any supposed irrationality in what we are studying. For that reason, it should come as a practical and fundamental warning not to impute irrationality to people in the study of history (or any other human endeavor) too quickly.

Nevertheless, the behavior of Northern and Southern politicians in the ten years before the Civil War is often described as irrational by many historians, as though the Civil War was a product of an undiagnosed madness, or a paralysis of communications so great as to make the tower of Babel the only worthwhile comparison. The great Allan Nevins described Southerners “in the final paroxysm of 1860–61” as being “filled with frenzy,” while Northerners turned “grimly implacable” over slavery. “The thinking” of North and South alike, concluded Nevins, “was largely irrational, governed by subconscious memories, frustrated desires, and the distortions of politicians and editors.” Dominated by “stereotypes” of each other, Northerners and Southerners were possessed by “fear,” and “fear was largely the product of ignorance, and ignorance—or misinformation—largely the product of propaganda.”1

Nevins’s was only the mildest of historians’ voices in the twentieth century who blamed the war on irrationality. Sometimes the irrationality took the form of an “egocentric sectionalism,” as it did for Frank Lawrence Owsley; other times, as for James Garfield Randall, it was a kind of political dementia that caused a systematic failure in the American political system and “incredible blundering” by a generation of incompetent politicians. Avery Craven believed that “sane policy” had been abandoned in the heat of unreason, and that “uncalled-for moves” and “irresponsible leadership” had doomed the nation to civil war and the wanton destruction of compromises that might have augured a better American future. 2 It did not relieve the bleakness of this interpretation that all