For their part, pro-slavery Southerners had long rehearsed their own conspiracy against what they viewed as the religious zealots in the vanguard of abolitionism, whom they called the “Black Republicans.” Among many white Southerners, as well as their Northern allies, the label “Black Republican” became a ubiquitous description for anyone who opposed the extension of slavery, and certainly for anyone favoring its elimination. In 1856, if you screamed “Black Republicans” enough and accused them of trying to achieve the “amalgamation” of the races through forced marriages, millions of voters would be frightened. Racial purity has often shown its power to unite white Americans. “The Black Republican party favor the full citizenship of the negro,” declared The Indiana Daily State Sentinel in 1857. The Detroit Free Press hailed Dred Scott because it destroyed “the underpinnings of negro-worship” and threw “that detestable ism in the dirt.” Frederick Douglass humorously exploited the irony of the terminology. At a state convention for Republican delegates in 1856, Douglass declared: “You are called Black Republicans. What right have you to that name? Among all the candidates you have selected, or talked of, I have not seen or heard of a single black one.”
Both sides of the American political divide now accused each other repeatedly of being the true “disunionists.” Political opponents were no longer election foes; they were enemies with values that threatened the republic. An opponent so evil and dangerous must be destroyed, not merely defeated. One clear lesson of the 1850s is the danger of conspiracy theories, how they grow in the cracks of a fractured society.
Are we a society driven now, as in the 1850s, by conspiratorial visions of each other? On the left, many see Trumpism, and the Republican Party that buttresses its extremes, as tantamount to the Slave Power, a devious force seeking to lock in minority rule through extreme gerrymandering, state and local culture wars and the partisan takeover of the Supreme Court. In the minds of some Fox News devotees, the specter of corporate neoliberalism, “coastal elites,” L.G.B.T.Q. rights and globalization is the new version of “Black Republicans,” taking over our material, moral and intellectual lives with “wokeism” and fraudulent voting.
Fear works in politics. Shout “voter fraud” loud and often enough, and it gains legitimacy. Label your opponent a “socialist,” and it will appear on placards at rallies. Declare mainstream print or television reporting “fake news,” and those on your side possess a ready-made slogan for any disagreeable information.
The conspiracies swirl around our digital information space in ways that 19th-century Americans could hardly imagine. The man who is accused of breaking into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco and assaulting her husband, Paul, was most likely inspired by a long-standing climate of Pelosi hatred, exemplified by Stewart Rhodes’s line from Jan. 10, 2021: “We should have brought rifles [to the Capitol]. We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang [expletive] Pelosi from the lamppost.”
The election of 1856 did not result in widespread violence, but it was very sectional, and conspiracy politics ran rampant. Buchanan won, carrying every slave state except Maryland, as well as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois and California, while Frémont won the rest of the free states. For some pundits at the time, and historians in retrospect, the election was called a “victory within defeat” for the Republicans. The old Whig Party was now effectively dead, its Northern remnants folded into the Republican Party, and the nativists more and more pitched their tents in the Republican camp as opponents to the expansion of slavery, the supposed denigration of free labor and the slaveholding oligarchy’s threat to individualism. The Republican Party was an unsteady coalition of factions and strange bedfellows, but it represented a potent new political force. The splintering of the American party system, a phenomenon in process ever since the war with Mexico, endangered the cohesion of the Union itself. What happened next would launch the country onto an irreversible course to war.
Credit...Rallygoers in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021: Joseph Prezioso/AFP, via Getty Images. Painting by H. Charles McBarren Jr. depicting the Battle of Gettysburg: VCG Wilson/Corbis, via Getty Images.
By the time Buchanan was ready to be sworn in, in March of 1857, the Supreme Court had finished its deliberations in the Dred Scott case. A winding legal road had brought the case to this point. The Scotts were legally married at Fort Snelling in what is now Minnesota, which was free territory in 1836, when Dred was around 40 and Harriet was 17. The impetus for their lawsuit might have come as much from Harriet as from Dred. They had two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, and Harriet was determined to protect them from enslavement. In 1842, their owner, Dr. John Emerson, returned to Missouri. He died a year later, and Dred and his family transferred to the ownership of his widow, Eliza Irene Sanford. Her brother, John Sanford, would eventually claim to be the true owner of the Scott family and declare his intention to possess his property.
But Scott had supporters in Missouri who saw the potential in his case for a freedom suit. Such suits were not uncommon during the 19th century, especially in the territories. They demonstrate the ambiguous and conflicted nature of enslaved people’s legal status in these volatile years of westward expansion. Scott’s case was first brought in the Circuit Court of St. Louis in 1846, where he prevailed, only to have the decision overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court by a 2-to-1 vote. The Missouri state justice William Scott, a pro-slavery Democrat, feared that to free the Scott family would risk disunion and, echoing John C. Calhoun, cause “the overthrow and destruction of our government.” From there the case made its way through a series of appeals. A Federal District Court concurred with the state’s decision. Scott’s supporters enlisted, pro bono, the famous free-soil politician and lawyer Montgomery Blair to take his case, and under Blair’s legal leadership, Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it reached the docket in late 1854.
The court faced three major questions. One, jurisdiction: As a Black man, was Dred Scott a citizen, with the right to sue in a federal court? Two, the validity of the “free soil” concept: Were Scott or his wife and their children entitled to freedom based on their residence for several years in a free state and a free territory? And three, the Missouri Compromise line: Would the court rule once and for all on whether Congress, and therefore the federal government, had the power to restrict the presence of slavery anywhere in the jurisdiction of the United States?
In one way or another, all of these issues were at the center of the 1856 election, and its bitter partisanship hung over the justices and their deliberations like a poisoned cloak. As is the case today with our conservative-majority court, the Taney court was decidedly partisan. Of the nine justices, seven were appointed to the bench by Southern pro-slavery presidents. Five of those seven were from slave states and slaveholding families. Of the four Northerners on the court, Robert C. Grier of Pennsylvania, an old Jacksonian Democrat, was appointed by President James K. Polk, perhaps the most pro-slavery chief executive of the entire antebellum era, and Samuel Nelson of New York was appointed by President John Tyler, a Virginian. They each joined the Southern majority in the Dred Scott decision. The two other Northerners, John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts, would be the dissenters in the case.
Ahead of the inauguration, Justice John Catron and Justice Grier corresponded directly with the president-elect about the case. Buchanan wrote back urging them to push for a decisive declaration on Congress’s power to control slavery in the territories, knowing full well that the justices were aware he sought a pro-slavery outcome. Grier consulted about Buchanan’s letter with Justice James Wayne of Georgia and the chief justice himself, in what one historian has called a highly irregular “game of judicial politics” and a “breathtaking example of judicial activism.” Buchanan was given advance notice of the decision so that he could, if he so chose, refer to it in his Inaugural Address in the first week of March. In no uncertain terms, by the time Taney sat down to write the majority opinion, the fix was in for a broad decision that would try to settle, in thoroughly pro-slavery terms, the constitutional question forever.
It was the finality of the decision that made it so pivotal in leading the country to open conflict. To radical abolitionists, and certainly to many Republicans, the most offensive part of the decision was that it closed off the possibility of liberty or citizenship for free Black people. To the political antislavery coalition, growing in the North, the case’s inflammatory result was that it explicitly opened all of the Western territories, potentially as well as Northern states, to the legality of slave ownership. Dred Scott v. Sandford declared an eternal pro-slavery future in America.
Resistance began with the two dissents. In Justice Curtis’s opinion, he reminded the chief justice and posterity that when the Constitution was adopted in 1787, free Black men had been able to vote for delegates for the ratification conventions in five states. He also pointed out that there was no racial qualification for citizenship anywhere in the Constitution, thus declaring Taney’s originalism bad history and false law. Curtis further contended, with a long history to back it up, that slavery could exist only where “positive law” expressly sanctioned it. Otherwise, how could so many Northern states have abolished it? And as to the claim that the Constitution had been written “exclusively by and for the white race,” Curtis labeled this a mere “assumption,” contradicted by the Preamble, which calls for a “more perfect union,” and the Declaration of Independence’s promise of natural rights. This opinion was printed and published almost immediately in pamphlet form, a highly unusual act. Curtis had taken Taney’s uninformed originalism and thrown it in his face.
Opposition to the decision quickly became a marker by which Republicans would define their careers. At the annual convention of the American Antislavery Society in May 1857, Frederick Douglass, now very much a political abolitionist devoted to fighting slavery through law and political action, said the Slave Power was “poisoning, corrupting and perverting the institutions of the country.” Douglass warned that the conspiracy threatened everyone. “The white man’s liberty has been marked out for the same grave with the black man’s,” he said. The “ballot box is desecrated, God’s law set at naught.” He believed that the only way to stop the Slave Power was direct confrontation, the “overthrow” of slavery, “sooner or later, by fair means or foul means … in peace or in blood.” As the historian Elizabeth Varon has written, the Dred Scott case and the extended reactions to it gave the Slave Power concept a new stark reality and a “terrifying boundlessness.”
From 1857, the Dred Scott case determined how many Americans voted. It made moderation nearly impossible, and many Republicans took more radical stances. The next year, Abraham Lincoln accepted the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in a speech at the Statehouse in Springfield, Ill. Standing on the high dais, Lincoln gave his poetic oration about a “house divided” that “cannot stand.” The one-term congressman and successful lawyer had always hated slavery, but he came of age a devotee of Henry Clay and the Whigs’ moderate approach. He was a gradualist about abolishing the institution and believed that the removal of some part of the African American population from the country remained an effective solution. But as we have seen, the election of 1856 was the end of the road for the Whigs. By 1858, Lincoln had begun to adopt a more aggressive tone.
The slavery controversy, Lincoln announced, “will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.” Just what Lincoln intended to predict in this speech has never been perfectly clear, but his fears and his analysis of the current divide were distinct and resounding. He believed that the national “government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” Lincoln kept a moderate’s hopeful pose: “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” For antislavery Northern Republicans, this was the existential fear unleashed by Dred Scott: that slavery would no longer be confined to the South, where it might gradually die out. Because of Dred Scott, they believed that slavery now stalked their own neighborhoods.
As a June breeze wafted off the prairie and through the windows of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Lincoln gave a blurry prediction. The “opponents” of slavery may “arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.” As Lincoln’s career moved ever closer to the national center in the next two years, those words — especially “ultimate extinction” — would be reread and repeated by both sides in the slavery crisis. Lincoln had laid down a marker: What the republic risked in the slavery crisis was everything.
For the remainder of the “House Divided” speech, Lincoln shifted to a vigorous attack on the Dred Scott decision. We often stop reading after the poetry of his opening, but the crisis posed to the Union emerges clearly in the rest of the address. Lincoln did not explicitly employ the term “Slave Power,” but he gave it many other names. He said that the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision together had become a “piece of machinery” in the hands of Southerners and their Northern Democratic allies. Lincoln insisted that his audience see what he saw: clear “evidences of design, and concert of action, among its chief bosses” to give slavery an eternal future in America. These designers — the Slave Power — had one primary goal since 1854: to open “all the national territory to slavery.” The idea of popular “self-government” had been rendered “perverted” by this organized cartel, such that under law, “if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.”
In stark terms, Lincoln had become the moderate as alarmist, a conspiracy theorist in his own right, alerting his tribe of the struggle ahead. Such blunt warnings had become mainstream rhetoric for Republicans by this point. Before ending the “House Divided” speech, Lincoln stated the deepest Republican and free-soil fear, especially in the wake of Dred Scott: that a new case would emanate from the border states, or even a free state, that would challenge whether any state could lawfully “exclude slavery from its limits.” Here Lincoln darkly predicted that “such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the states.” Lincoln believed that such a decision was “probably coming” and that the only way to stop it was by organizing and voting, such that the “power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown.”
Four months after Lincoln gave his “House Divided” speech, Senator William Seward of New York delivered a speech in Rochester in which he said the country had become a “theater,” staging a drama between “two radically different political systems.” The two systems were “incompatible,” Seward announced, and on a course of “collision” in an expanding single nation. Echoing, even extending, Lincoln’s metaphor, Seward concluded portentously: “It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.”
Today many Americans would agree that our current politics pit two such forces against each other. As a result, our country faces crises of institutional legitimacy, of utterly polarized media sources, of transparent voter suppression, of irreconcilable public-policy debates over guns, abortion, climate change, public schools and attempts to control the conduct of elections. We have reason to wonder if the persistence of racism is a transhistorical ingredient of American politics. Justifiably, we fear vigilante, militia violence against the institutions and political leaders we depend on. We rightly worry about whether American democracy can withstand the current pressures placed upon it by the authoritarian tendencies that Trumpism has unleashed.
A striking dissimilarity between the 19th century and today is that even during the secession crisis of 1860-61, those who lost elections acknowledged their defeat. They acted politically to organize against their opponents in the next election or they took the revolutionary act of domestic insurrection and withdrawal from the Union, but they did not dispute the election results.
Are today’s myriad crises somehow equivalent to the great question of slavery in late-antebellum America?
What is common to the 1850s and our own time is fundamental and disruptive change and a powerful minority that seeks to turn back the clock to prevent it. We can see this in some of the similarities between the decisions in Dred Scott and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Each draws on history as a means of arresting certain developments in society. Taney, in Dred Scott, argued that Black people had always been perceived as inferior and had been mostly enslaved and therefore possessed no rights as citizens. But that had not stopped many thousands of Black people and their allies from demanding and fighting, legally or otherwise, for their freedom and their rights. Similarly, in Dobbs, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that abortion was nowhere in the Constitution and had never been legal until Roe v. Wade. But women had sought abortions for generations, however clandestinely, as a medical practice that they considered their right.
Each decision says, in effect, that because certain freedoms were not enshrined in law historically, the evolution of society to embrace those freedoms is irrelevant. Would Justice Alito overturn Loving v. Virginia (1967) because marriage between two people of different races is nowhere in the Constitution, or because decades of state laws prohibited it? Should clean-air legislation be on the chopping block because it is nowhere in the 1787 or the 1868 Constitutions? What about Native American citizenship? Women’s suffrage? Federal regulation of the industrial economy? Disability rights? Same-sex marriage? And what of the precious right to vote, so long denied or suppressed by law or by violence in this country? Voting rights are not in the original Constitution, either.
In both cases, the stakes are the nature and extent of freedom in this republic. What will the next year bring? Is a second Dobbs v. Jackson decision on the horizon, as Republicans in the late 1850s feared a second Dred Scott? There is good reason to fear the Moore v. Harper case from North Carolina, which will test the “independent state legislature” theory, which contends that only state legislatures — not the state courts — have authority over federal election procedures and voting rights. Progressives understandably fear that the states’ rights doctrine has become a Trojan horse of the right wing, returning power to the states so they remain safe from the post-Civil War and post-New Deal regulatory powers of the federal government.
Are today’s myriad crises somehow equivalent to the great question of slavery in late-antebellum America? Can our current rabble of loud difference still be governed? The recent midterm elections provide measures of reassurance: Most election deniers lost, although some key candidates did prevail in Colorado, Florida and Ohio, Wisconsin and elsewhere. Overall, it appears that at least small majorities in many regions prefer facts over bizarre conspiracy, democracy over authoritarianism and American pluralism over racism and xenophobia. In other Western democracies, far-right extremists win seats in national assemblies, where coalitions can constrain their ideas. But in a two-party system, the capture of one party by extremists is enough to cause great political havoc and violence — a lesson we should have learned from the destruction of our Union in 1861.
Authoritarianism is an American historical tradition, newly energized and threatening our republican existence. In coming elections, we shall see whether our 21st-century democracy will live or die honestly, whether we, too, are heading for collapse or renewal through politics, law or civil conflict. How we answer such challenges will determine whether it is 1857 again in America. Even if it is, we need to remember that antislavery advocates did not merely lay down in front of the juggernaut of Dred Scott; they mobilized and fought back — over race, rights and their future.
David W. Blight is the Sterling professor of history at Yale University as well as the director of its Gilder Lehrman Center for the study of slavery and abolition. His book on Frederick Douglass won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for history. Máximo Tuja, who goes by Max-o-matic, is an illustrator in Barcelona known for his collage work. He is the founder of The Weird