358 Chapter 13 The Coming of the Civil War
carried the day. Buchanan won only a minority of the
popular vote, but he had strength in every section. He
got 174 electoral votes to Frémont’s 114 and Fillmore’s
- The significant contest took place in the populous
states just north of slave territory—Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Indiana, and Illinois. Of these, Buchanan carried all but
Ohio, although by narrow margins.
No one could say that James Buchanan lacked
political experience. Elected to the Pennsylvania legis-
lature in 1815 when he was only twenty-four years
old, he served for well over twenty years in Congress
and had served as minister to Russia, as secretary of
state, and as minister to Great Britain.
Personally, Buchanan was a bundle of contradic-
tions. Dignified in bearing and by nature cautious, he
could consume enormous amounts of liquor without
showing the slightest sign of inebriation. A big, heavy
man, he was nonetheless remarkably graceful and light
on his tiny feet, of which he was inordinately proud. He
wore a very high collar to conceal a scarred neck, and
because of an eye defect he habitually carried his head
to one side and slightly forward, which gave him, as his
biographer says, “a perpetual attitude of courteous def-
erence and attentive interest” that sometimes led indi-
viduals to believe they had won a greater share of his
attention and support than was actually the case. In fact
he was extremely stubborn and sometimes vindictive.
The Dred Scott Decision
Before Buchanan could fairly take the Kansas problem in
hand, an event occurred that drove another deep wedge
between North and South. Back in 1834 Dr. John
Emerson of St. Louis joined the army as a surgeon and
was assigned to duty at Rock Island, Illinois. Later he
was transferred to Fort Snelling, in the Wisconsin
Territory. In 1838 he returned to Missouri.
Accompanying him on these travels was his body ser-
vant, Dred Scott, a slave. In 1846, after Emerson’s
death, Scott and his wife Harriet, whom he had married
while in Wisconsin, brought suit in the Missouri courts
for their liberty with the help of a friendly lawyer. They
claimed that residence in Illinois, where slavery was
barred under the Northwest Ordinance, and in the
Wisconsin Territory, where the Missouri Compromise
outlawed it, had made them free.
The future of Dred and Harriet Scott mattered
not at all to the country or the courts; at issue was the
question of whether Congress or the local legislatures
had the power to outlaw slavery in the territories.
After many years of litigation, the case reached the
Supreme Court of the United States. On March 6,
1857, two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, the
high tribunal acted, issuing what is known as the
Dred Scott decision. Free or slave, the Court
declared, blacks were not citizens; therefore, Scott
could not sue in a federal court. This was dubious
legal logic because many blacks were accepted as citi-
zens in some states when the Constitution was
drafted and ratified, and Article IV, Section 2, says
that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all
privileges and immunities of citizens in the several
states.” But the decision settled Scott’s fate.
However, the Court went further. Since the plain-
tiff had returned to Missouri, the laws of Illinois no
longer applied to him. His residence in the Wisconsin
Territory—this was the most controversial part of the
decision—did not make him free because the Missouri
Compromise was unconstitutional. According to the
Bill of Rights (the Fifth Amendment), the federal gov-
ernment cannot deprive any person of life, liberty, or
property without due process of law.^1 Therefore, Chief
Justice Roger B. Taney reasoned, “an Act of Congress
which deprives a person... of his liberty or property
merely because he came himself or brought his property
into a particular Territory... could hardly be dignified
with the name of due process of law.” The Missouri
Compromise had deprived Dr. Emerson of his
“property”—his slaves—and thus was unconstitutional!
In addition to invalidating the already repealed
Missouri Compromise, the decision threatened
Douglas’s principle of popular sovereignty, for if
Congress could not exclude slaves from a territory,
how could a mere territorial legislature do so? Until
statehood was granted, slavery seemed as inviolate as
freedom of religion or speech or any other civil liberty
guaranteed by the Constitution. Where formerly free-
dom (as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights) was a
national institution and slavery a local one, now,
according to the Court, slavery was nationwide,
excluded only where states had specifically abolished it.
The irony of employing the Bill of Rights to keep
blacks in chains did not escape northern critics. Now
slaves could be brought into the Minnesota Territory,
even into Oregon. In his inaugural address Buchanan
had sanctimoniously urged the people to accept the
forthcoming ruling, “whatever this may be,” as a final
settlement. Many assumed (indeed, it was true) that
he had put pressure on the Court to act as it did and
that he knew in advance of his speech what the deci-
sion would be. If this “greatest crime in the judicial
annals of the Republic” was allowed to stand,
Northerners argued, the Republican party would have
no reason to exist: Its program had been declared
unconstitutional! The Dred Scott decision convinced
thousands that the South was engaged in an aggres-
sive attempt to extend the peculiar institution so far
that it could no longer be considered peculiar.(^1) Some state constitutions had similar provisions, but the slave states
obviously did not.