Don E. Fehrenbacher
"Chief Justice Taney's jurisprudence needs no rehabilitation. His decision was the correct one."
I was wrong. Dred Scott hasn't been universally condemned. 4ConservativeJustices has spoken.
"Personally, Justice Taney considered slavery wrong, and had freed his slaves by 1827."
"The strong feeling that governed [Taney] were no doubt a mixture. Love for the South and pride in his own southern heritage mingled with emotions of a negative sort. One finds, to be sure, no evidence of the suppressed moral anxiety that some scholars have discovered as the eruptive source of mounting southern hysteria. The study of Taney's character and behavior con tributes nothing to the "guilt thesis." On the other hand, his private letters do lend support to recent emphasis on southern fears, especially the fear of slave uprisings. Indeed, by the late 1850's Taney had plainly been caught up in a pattern of reciprocating apprehension that C. Vann Woodward calls "paranoia" and "counterparanoia."
"Besides fear, the was indignation. The counterpart of Taney's love for the South was his growing hostility to its northern critic. He liked to single out Massachusetts, once home of African slave traders, but now the center of abolitionism, as the epitome of northern selfishness and hypocrisy. Taney, above all in the late 1850's, was fiercely anti-antislavery. We must not be misled by his physical weakness or gentle mien. Wrath, says an ancient Greek poet, is the last thing in a man to grown old. The Dred Scott opinion, defensive in substance, but aggressive in temper, was the work of an angry southern gentleman.
"From a study of Taney's private emotional responses to the sectional controversy, one can learn something about the coming of the Civil War. Like the chief Justice, a majority of southerners had no significant economic stake in the institution of slavery, but they did have a vital stake in preservation of the southern social order and of southern self-respect. In the end, it may have been the assault on their self-respect - the very language of the antislavery crusade - that drove many southerns over the edge.... With increasing frequency and bitterness in the years that followed, southerner protested that they were being degraded by northern sanctimony. Taney's Dred Scott decision ... is a document of great revelatory value. In the very unreasonableness of its arguments one finds a measure of southern desperation." (Pg 560-561, deleting comments concerning Justice Daniel)
I'm glad we got that straight ;o)
See #404. Not everyone thinks the decision was wrong. It upheld decades of PRIOR decisions on the same subject, as well as the opinion and LAWS of numerous federal Congresses. The only ones who got their panties in a wad were yankees, who were terrified that they might actually have to live next to a black.