LINCOLN AND THE DRED SCOTT DECISION
With unfailing vision Lincoln was attracted to the larger issues under
all professed and alleged reasons, both North and South, as to the cause
of difference in attitude on the slavery question. He believed it was
largely an industrial and economical problem, a moral conflict in the
North mainly through the absence of a controlling material interest.
With plain, blunt speech, he laid bare the national cancer in October,
1856, showing that there was no difference in the mental or moral
structure of the people North and South, but that in the slavery
question the people of the South had an immediate, immense, pecuniary
interest, while with the people of the North it was merely an abstract
question of moral right.
The slaves of the South, he continued, were worth a thousand millions of
dollars, and that financial interest united the Southern people as one
man; that moral principle was a looser bond than pecuniary interest.
Hence if a Southern man aspired to be President, they choked him down,
that the glittering prize of the presidency might be held up on southern
terms to Northern ambition. And their conventions in 1848, 1852 and 1856
had been struggles exclusively among Northern men, each vying to outbid
the other, the South standing calmly by finally to cry "Going, going,
gone" to the highest bidder.[329]
[329] Lincoln's Speeches, 1, 223.
The Dred Scott decision throws a shadow over the judicial history of the
United States. That in an hour of crisis the supreme judicial tribunal
should ally itself with the potent institution of injustice rather than
with humanity, should interpret the principles of the Constitution and
the Declaration of Independence in a paltry and impoverished manner,
should cringe before title and power and grovel in gloom in the dawn of
a new era of American citizenship, an era that was to hurl its
thunderbolts with ever increasing daring against the further advance of
the slave sovereignty, is baffling and astounding.
Lincoln realized that the Supreme Court to be venerated, must be in the
van, and not a laggard in the world spirit and progress; a guide and not
a pupil in the best kind of citizenship and sensitive to the rising tide
of public conscience. The Dred Scott decision did more than any malice
of foe to weaken the general regard for the august tribunal--the one
supreme discovery of American politics.
It is of interest to study Lincoln's attitude to this decision and to
the tribunal responsible for it. Above most men, he had preached the
gospel of sacred devotion to law and to the iniquity of mob rule. He was
an enemy of all violence. Yet he rebelliously abided the adjudication
that made the prospective emancipation of the black man more uncertain,
that imprisoned the enlightened principles of the Fathers of the
Republic, that manacled America in her Titan march on the highway of
humanity.
Lincoln maintained in 1857 that judicial decisions had two uses, to
absolutely determine the case decided, and to indicate to the public how
other similar cases would be decided. Lincoln then argued that if the
decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges,
without partisan bias, in accordance with legal public expectation, and
in no part based on assumed historical facts which were not really true;
or if it had been before the court more than once, and had there been
reaffirmed through a course of years, it then might be even
revolutionary not to acquiesce in it as a precedent.[330]
[330] Lincoln's Speeches, 1, 228.
Still, by the side of the impassioned outbreaks of the abolitionists and
radicals this criticism seems cold and measured. But Lincoln with his
usual apprehension justified his opposition by democratic example. He
confounded Douglas by recalling the action of his ideal Jackson on a
Whig measure, the National Bank, with the statement that the same
Supreme Court once decided a national bank to be constitutional; but
President Jackson disregarded the decision, and vetoed a bill for the
recharter, partly on constitutional ground declaring that each public
functionary must support the Constitution as he understood it. And then
to the further discomfiture of Douglas he declared that again and again
he had heard Judge Douglas denounce that bank decision and applaud
General Jackson for disregarding it; that it would be interesting for
him to look over his recent speech, and see how exactly his fierce
philippics against resisting Supreme Court decisions fell upon his own
head.[331] Still Douglas might have retorted that in those days the
Whigs were violent in their denunciation of General Jackson for that
very opposition.
[331] _Ibid._, 229.
In the same speech Lincoln burst into indignant eloquence at the policy
that was a departure from the old ideas of justice and liberty and the
still more radiant hope of the future indulged in by Washington,
Jefferson and Franklin, that in time slavery would no longer darken or
endanger the national life, for Lincoln said that in those days the
Declaration was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but
that at this time it was construed, hawked at and torn, till, if its
framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize
it. He observed that all the powers of earth seemed rapidly combining
against the negro; that Mammon, ambition, philosophy and theology of the
day were fast joining the cry; that they had him in his prison-house,
bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which could never be unlocked
without the concurrence of every key--the keys in the hands of a hundred
different men, and they scattered to a hundred and distant places; and
they still stood musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of
mind and matter, could be produced to make the impossibility of his
escape more complete than it was.[332]
[332] Lincoln's Speeches, 1, 231.
Less than a decade of history proved Lincoln wiser than those who framed
the momentous majority opinion in the Dred Scott case. Lincoln was
learned not alone in legal knowledge, but was also familiar with the
mighty national movements that laugh laws and decisions to scorn; that
ultimately and finally determine progress. These judges were students of
the past, slaves of precedent, defenders of antiquity, while Lincoln was
a student of the present and the future and the ambassador of abiding
justice. He had as deep and ultimate a knowledge of the national
character and capacity as the statesman, and was a student of political
and social progress in order to follow and wisely lead the deep public
sentiment and conscience that alone measures true civilization.