Decided March 6, 1857.

Justice Cheryl I. HARRIS delivered the opinion of the Court.1

Dred and Harriet Scott have petitioned the courts for their freedom and the freedom of their two children, Eliza and Lizzie, for more than ten years. The relief they are seeking is of crucial significance to them as a family, but the issues implicated in their case go to the heart of the national identity and will shape the nation’s destiny. The conflict over slavery that is now raging in the political sphere is not new although, in recent times, it had taken on a more incendiary tone. Its origins lie in the contradiction between the ideals of liberty guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution and the institution of slavery.The birth of the nation was bound up with slavery as well as the dispossession of native tribes, upon whose land the great edifice of American finance, wealth, and power have been built.

The book opens with a chapter on slavery, starting with the absence of Blacks from “we the people” in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. The American Revolution led to the Constitution, and Hamilton’s reports were vital to the new country. They set the basis for the Louisiana Purchase and the Missouri Compromise. Cotton agriculture in the South and manufacture in the North contributed to economic growth. The 1837 banking crisis interrupted this progress and further compromises over slavery in new states set the stage for the Civil War. Time on the Cross is examined to illustrate the role of Blacks and how hard it is to write about it.

Chapter 4 details how antebellum Americans followed the spirit as well as the letter of the Constitution. Conservative Northerners embodied the “spirit of 1787,” aiding the Southern minority on matters relating to slavery when the explicit provisions of the Constitution were not sufficient. These conservative Northerners did their constitutional duty by providing sectional balance to proslavery presidential tickets, thereby giving the appearance that the South did not dominate the executive branch. In Congress, conservative Northerners also voted with Southerners on sectional bills, blocking antislavery measures and passing proslavery ones. The most important of these bills formed the grand sectional compromises: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1833, and the Compromise of 1850. These compromises gained the aura of de facto constitutional amendments. Unfortunately, these grand sectional compromises did not solve the constitutional problems raised by slavery; they only delayed the final reckoning. On the federal bench, Northern conservatives cast votes for and occasionally wrote proslavery decisions, including most notoriously Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Thus, all three branches of the government established by the Constitution were affected by the sectional struggle over slavery.