[Restorer]

Well, I've read Taney's decision for the Court. I haven't tried to wade through all the partially dissenting and partially concurring opinions by the other justices. :)

I find it perfectly obvious that this decision was made on purely political grounds, which the Chief Justice then attempted to justify under the law. There is also considerable historical evidence that the President and various southern politicians were improperly involved in the decision.

Giving Justice Taney the benefit of the doubt, he may have been trying to put to rest an extraordinarily divisive issue in order to allow the country to heal its wounds.

The parallel to Roe v. Wade is quite amazing. The political system prescribed by the Constitution had, in the opinion of a large segment of the elite, broken down and was unable to legislate a solution. So the Court attempted to deal with it and put it beyond debate. Didn't work then or now. Merely inflamed what had previous been a comparatively minor issue.

The major difference is that abortion appears to be slowly disappearing as an issue, whereas slavery became more and more critical till it erupted in war. IMHO, this is due to sheer exhaustion on the part of the prolife forces. After all, it was less than ten years from Dred to the WBTS. We've lived with Roe for a lot longer than that.

[nolu chan]

[Restorer] There is also considerable historical evidence that the President and various southern politicians were improperly involved in the decision.

Other than Lincoln's unsupported conspiracy theory for which he admitted he had no evidence, I am unaware of any considerable or lesser amount of historical evidence to support this seemingly absurd notion.

The case was (unlawfully) manufactured by abolitionists for abolitionists and was foisted upon the Supreme Court with a deliberately falsified statement of facts agreed to by the supposedly contending parties. As a case under appellate review, the facts of the case were whatever was established by the Missouri court and not subject to appellate review.

Likewise contributing to the rehabilitation of Taney was the pub­lication in 1910 of the Catron and Grier letters informing Buchanan that the two dissenting justices had forced the Court majority to un­dertake a broad decision instead of the narrow one originally planned. As a consequence, much of the blame for the resulting judicial disas­ter could be shifted from Taney to Curtis and McLean. Frank H. Hodder thought that Curtis was the worst offender of the three, but McLean's notorious presidential ambitions made him the more obvi­ous culprit. In 1927, Beveridge confided to Hodder: "Justice Holmes told me (but this is confidential, and you cannot use it unless you find it out some other way) that the tradition in the Court is that McLean stirred up the whole mess and that Curtis probably would not have peeped if McLean had not ripped and torn around so much and blew off so loudly."

Source: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 1978, p. 590

The conspiracy theory was thrown out by Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Now my friends I wish you to attend for a little while to one or two other things in that Springfield speech. My main object was to show, so far as my humble ability was capable of showing to the people of this country, what I believed was the truth -- that there was a tendency, if not a conspiracy among those who have engineered this slavery question for the last four or five years, to make slavery perpetual and universal in this nation. Having made that speech principally for that object, after arranging the evidences that I thought tended to prove my proposition, I concluded with this bit of comment:

We cannot absolutely know that these exact adaptations are the result of pre-concert, but when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen -- Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance -- and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places and not a piece too many or too few -- not omitting even the scaffolding -- or if a single piece be lacking we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in -- in such a case we fell it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin, and Roger and James, all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn before the first blow was struck. [Great cheers.]

-- Abraham Lincoln, August 21, 1858, Ottawa, Illinois, Lincoln-Douglas debate

Fehrenbacher gives this short shrift.

The idea of a slave-power conspiracy to nationalize slavery had originated with abolitionists many years earlier. Gaining strength from the Dred Scott decision, it would be exploited by hundreds of Republican editors and speakers over a period of fifteen months before Abraham Lincoln, on a warm June evening in 1858, made it the central theme of his opening speech in the senatorial campaign. this "absurd bogey," as Allan Nevins has called it, aptly serves to exemplify the "paranoid style" in American politics. Unless one defines "conspiracy" so loosely as to mean little more than "tendency," evidence of an antebellum conspiracy to legalize slavery throughout the United states is virtually nonexistent. There were no conferences held, no organizationsformed, no plots laid for the achievement of such a purpose.

Source: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 1978, p. 451.

[William Terrell]

I read and analyzed the case some time ago. If you have indeed read it, you would have to acknowledge that the case was properly decided according the the US Constitution as ti stood at that time, the constitutions of the states in question and the prevailing customs at the time.

In that period, public sympathies were turning against slavery and the slave trade, an enterprise the North was involved in as well as the South. The case itself was indeed politically motivated and crafted, albeit to open the US to citizenship of nationalities not ordinarily accepted under the immigration laws of the time, not just Negroes.

The case was an attempt to actually judicially legislate from the bench, and the SC of that period did not play the game. The justices decided the case along strict constitutional lines, whereas, Roe v Wade was judicial legislation.

In the intervening years, much effort has been made to demonize this case. Methinks you haven't read it, or if you have, it was a cursory once over.

Slavery was and should have been dead, as it was in England by the efforts of William Wilberforce. To kill it here required constitutional amendments, and it is well said of the court that it did not let political pressure force them to usurp legislative functions, as latter courts were suborned.