Letter, Roger Brooke Taney to Caleb Cushing thanking Cushing for his support of Taney's decision in the Dred Scott case, 9 November 1857

Reproduction number: A25 (color slide; pages 1 and 2); A26 (color slide; pages 3 and 4)
Dred Scott v. Sanford, 19 How. 393, was decided by the United States Supreme Court on 6 March 1857. Scott (1809-1858), a slave, had been taken many years before from Missouri, a slave state, to the free state of Illinois and to Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was forbidden by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. After returning to Missouri, he sued for his freedom on the grounds that his residence in a free state and in free territory had released him from bondage. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (1777-1864), delivering the opinion of the Court, held that a slave's status was fixed by the laws of the state in which he lived. Scott, as a slave, could not be a citizen and could not sue in the federal courts. Furthermore, since slaves were only property, they could not be regulated by Congress and excluded from any territory. The Missouri Compromise, which had already been repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, was "not warranted by the Constitution, and [was] therefore void." Scott had not been made free by being carried into territory north of the compromise line. This decision greatly inflamed the sectional controversy and was denounced by antislavery elements everywhere.
Caleb Cushing (1800-1879), who had served as attorney general under President Franklin Pierce (1804-1869), represented a minority voice raised in the North in support of Taney. In a major speech in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in October 1857, Cushing defended Taney as "the very incarnation of judicial purity, integrity, science and wisdom." (Caleb Cushing, Speech Delivered in City Hall, Newburyport, October 31, 1857 (Boston: The Boston Post, 1857), 45.) Grateful for this support, Taney thanked Cushing in this letter of 9 November 1857, indicating that the "public mind" was not "in a condition to listen to reason" and noting that "wild passions ruled the hour." The Dred Scott decision was eventually made obsolete by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. The aged Taney, considered to have been in the service of the "slave power," came to be judged in the light of the Dred Scott decision, and the prestige he had earned over a long and productive career in public service disappeared.