Buchanan and Sectional
Politics
1857—The Year Everything Went
Wrong
• Dred Scott v. Sandford
• Panic of 1857
• LeCompton Constitution
Dred Scott Case
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Facts of the Case
Strader precedent
Strange contingency puts case before SOCTUS
Nature of ruling
“Slave Power Conspiracy”
For understandable reasons, Republican party
critique of case colors legal matters. Was the
bulk of Taney’s ruling obiter dicta
• Ableman v. Booth
Panic of 1857
• Real Causes
• Imagined causes
• results
Lecompton
• Buchanan made it a test of party loyalty
• Douglas’ refusal to support “lecompton
swindle” cost his support of Southern
Democrats.
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
• L. as a White Supremacist (Lerone Bennett—Ebony
Magazine)
• “I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the
negro to be equal to the white man. He belongs to an
inferior race, and must always occupy an inferior
position.”—L.
• Lincolnian anti-slavery: “In the right to eat the bread,
without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand
earns, he is my equal and the equal of judge Douglas,
and the equal of every living man.”
• Freeport Doctrine Myth—Southern Democrats already
hated D. for abandoning Lecompton.
Lerone Bennett (1928-
Lincoln-Douglas Debate Sites
Other Issues
• Northern opposition to Cuba and Southern
opposition to Homestead Bill.
• Crusade to reopen the slave trade
• Wanderer Prosecution and aftermath
• Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis
(1857)
• John Brown and Harper’s Ferry
• William W. Freehling, “John Brown and Three
Other Men Coincidentally Name John”: John
Fee, John C. Underwood, and John Clark. How
internal subversion thesis could be demostrated.
This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the
law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to
be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches
me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do
to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further,
to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with
them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I
am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter
of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done
as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of
His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is
deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the
furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood
further with the blood of my children and with the blood
of millions in this slave country whose rights are
disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I
submit; so let it be done!