Sherman Logan:"Well, no it wasn't."
Thanks for pointing that out, and for making the cogent case.
I had overlooked it in my rush to make another obvious point: Dred-Scott fully demonstrates how supreme the Southern Slave Power actually was in the 1857 Federal government.
So there can be no legitimate claim that the South was not adequately represented, or that its interests weren't fully addressed in Washington.
Any talk about "Big Government" in Washington causing "injury or oppression" amongst sovereign slave-states is just nonsense.
Thanks.
One of the odd things about the antebellum political and cultural confrontation is that both sides sincerely believed they were on the defensive against attacks by the other side.
And they were both right.
Southerners, accurately, had a nagging sensation they were “on the wrong side of history.” Anybody following world events had to be aware that slavery was losing ground around the world, and that abolition was likely to come to America sometime. In self-defense they felt obliged to fortify their position.
Northerners, accurately, felt that the southern efforts to do so violated decades-old compromises, that southerners repeatedly used threats of secession to get their own way. Then when they couldn’t get what they wanted by means of fair political methods, they resorted to the underhanded and really quite unprecedented Dred Scott decision to force their views on the majority.
While various laws had been held unconstitutional before, I’m unaware of any major political issue based on settled law decades old that the Court insisted on forcing on a resistant majority of the country. It was widely believed at the time and since that the Court was fully prepared to use the 5th Amendment to declare state laws abolishing slavery to be unconstitutional.
Wouldn’t have worked, of course. But the decades of southern dominance in DC and the repeated caving in of northerners convinced many southerners that they could pull it off. That the despised Yankees would never develop the backbone to resist.