Lincoln's Dred Scott: Contesting the Declaration of Independence

This paper will consider only a few aspects of Lincoln’s response to the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). It will not provide an account of the history of the case, or a reading of either Justice Taney’s majority opinion, or the dissenting opinions by Justices McLean and Curtis. It also will not discuss Lincoln’s use of the decision to advance the general slave power conspiracy thesis—the claim that slaveholders, in defense of slavery, must seek to dominate every polity of which they are a part, and to that extent must subvert democracy. Nor will it consider the special slave power conspiracy thesis Lincoln advanced in the 1858 “House Divided” speech, the claim that Stephen Douglas, along with Chief Justice Taney and Presidents Pierce and Buchanan, had been maturing a scheme to generate a “second Dred Scott decision” that would prohibit even the states from abolishing slavery since before Douglas authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Nor will it consider Douglas’s own interesting attempt to subvert the decision through the Freeport Doctrine. This paper will consider only the way Lincoln’s attempts to oppose and transform that decision raise some of the deepest questions about the role of underlying principles in politics and law. The central political problem Lincoln had to face in confronting the Dred Scott decision was that it ruled that the key plank of his party’s platform was unconstitutional, holding that the federal government could not prohibit slavery from spreading to the western territories. Lincoln responded to this argument in detail in the Cooper Union address in 1860, making clear that if one looks