The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics
by Don E. Fehrenbacher
Summary
Don E. Fehrenbacher devotes his own Pulitzer winning book to the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott versus Sandford, the case that denied African Americans, enslaved or free, any claim to United States citizenship. Fehrenbacher reconstructs Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion in full, including its claim that a perpetual and impassable barrier had existed between the races since the country's founding and its ruling that Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories, a decision that struck down the Missouri Compromise line that had governed the expansion of slavery for more than three decades.
Fehrenbacher traces the case from Dred Scott's original lawsuit through the personalities on Taney's court who shaped the final ruling, and he follows the explosive political reaction that Taney's decision was meant to prevent rather than provoke. Fehrenbacher shows Northern Republicans, Abraham Lincoln among them, treating the ruling as proof of a deliberate proslavery conspiracy reaching into the judiciary itself, and Southern Democrats demanding it stand as binding constitutional law, a split that hardened sectional politics rather than resolving the territorial question the way Taney had intended.
Fehrenbacher, who had completed and published David M. Potter's own Pulitzer winning history two years earlier, brings the same command of primary legal and political sources to a single case that Potter had brought to the whole sectional crisis. Reading the book means following a legal decision in genuine depth, its reasoning, its politics and its consequences, and it suits a reader who wants to understand exactly how one Supreme Court ruling helped push an already divided country closer to civil war.
Historical Context & Significance
The Dred Scott Case won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for History, two years after Fehrenbacher had seen David M. Potter's own prizewinning book, The Impending Crisis, into print following Potter's death.
Fehrenbacher taught American history at Stanford from 1953 to 1984, specializing in nineteenth century politics, slavery and Abraham Lincoln, and the book remains regarded as the authoritative modern study of the Dred Scott decision and its political fallout. He won the Lincoln Prize in 1997, the year of his death, capping a career spent explaining how the legal and political history of slavery shaped the nation's path toward civil war. Completing Potter's book and then winning for his own within a three year span made Fehrenbacher one of the few historians of his generation connected to two separate Pulitzer Prize for History winners.