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The Death of Taney
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/the-death-of-taney/ ^ | October 15, 2014 | Timothy S. Huebner

Posted on 10/16/2014 9:05:49 PM PDT by iowamark

On Oct. 12, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln must have breathed a bit easier.

Not because the war was over — it would last another six months. Not because he had been re-elected — the election remained nearly a month away. And not because Gen. William T. Sherman had begun his decisive march through Georgia — the general was still holding Atlanta. While much remained unsettled, Lincoln’s achievements as president seemed more secure that autumn day because the president learned that his old nemesis Roger B. Taney, the Maryland-born chief justice of the Supreme Court, had died.

Ever since Taney had handed down the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, he and Lincoln had been bitter rivals. Taney was a well-known defender of slavery, a bias he showed most famously in that case, when the court attempted to resolve, once and for all, the contentious issue of slavery in federal territories. Taney and six other justices had done so by ruling squarely on the side of slaveholders; according to Taney, slaveholding was a constitutional right, one with which neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere.

Lincoln, who by then had served in Congress but was now back in Illinois, working as a politically active lawyer, disagreed strongly with the decision, and his opposition to Dred Scott fueled his political rise in the North. When he ran for Congress the next year, he debated the matter fiercely with his Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas. Lincoln strongly implied that Taney, Douglas and other leaders had conspired to spread slavery throughout the land. And in 1860, Lincoln ran on a Republican Party platform that denounced the Dred Scott ruling as “a dangerous political heresy.”...

(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: History; Military/Veterans
KEYWORDS: civilwar; dredscott; dredscottvsandford; greatestpresident; lincoln; maryland; milhist; rogertaney; stephendouglas; thecivilwar
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To: lentulusgracchus
Jackson gave cover to Lincoln on the idea of hanging dissenters and secessionists.

So how many did Lincoln hang?

Think that would pass muster with the Framers or the People who ratified the Constitution, as "the law of the land", and Militia resistance to its enactment as "resistance to the Laws of the Nation" or some such formula?

So which law passed by a Yankee majority was it that justified rebellion and war?

Come on, think about it. Quincy Adams launched a sectional conspiracy to make war. And he articulated it (according to his most recent biographer) just as a young Illinois congressman took his seat in the House of Representative several rows behind him.

Your post is remarkably short on facts. You've heard of those: quotes, dates, documents, etc. Instead you slander a man who served his country honorably with an intent to kill hundreds of thousands.

The only Yankee conspiracy I'm aware of is the Secret Six, and they were quite obviously not only quite powerless but also remarkably incompetent. There is a good deal more evidence of conspiracy among southern fire-eaters than among northern abolitionists, who spent a lot of their time and energy fighting amongst themselves.

I am quite in agreement that certain actions of the federal government would justify secession and even war. But the federal government had done nothing of the kind before secession.

61 posted on 10/23/2014 6:59:50 PM PDT by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan

Sorry, JQA was an opponent of slavery, not a proponent.


62 posted on 10/23/2014 7:08:41 PM PDT by Sherman Logan
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