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Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 16:52:07 -0500 From: "Oakes, James" <JOakes@gc.cuny.edu> We don't have to speculate about what Lincoln would have done about Dred Scott. He said in 1858 and 1859 that if the Republicans got control of Congress they should overrule the Supreme Court legislatively, and that's exactly what Congress did. In April, 1862, the Republicans passed a bill outlawing slavery in all the territories, and Lincoln signed it happily. The bill flatly contradicted the Supreme Court decision that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional. As for the part of Taney's decision declaring that blacks were not citizens, Lincoln considered it obiter dicta, since citizenship was something states determined. To my knowledge Lincoln never said that the way to get around Dred Scott was to appoint more sympathetic judges, though in fact three of the six justices died in his first year of office. When Taney died a few years later Lincoln killed two birds with one stone by appointing Samuel Chase, thus removing a troublemaker from his cabinet while putting someone sympathetic to the radicals on the high court. By then Lincoln's major concern about the court was whether it would declare wartime emancipation unconstitutional. Chase's appointment took care of that, but the Thirteenth Amendment did so even more. There's nothing like politics to get things done. As for my friend Paul Finkelman's speculation that a Garrisonian secession would have ended slavery--I don't see how that gets us out of a war. If the southern states were prepared to go to war merely to avoid a Lincoln presidency, why would they have sat quietly as the North invited fugitive slaves across the border and threatened slavery in any number of other ways? But I haven't read his article and Paul may have already dealt with this. Personally, I prefer to judge Garrison by the standard he set for himself: His goal, he said, was "moral persuasion." So when I read his denunciations of the Constitution as a pact with the devil, of the northern churches as corrupted by the filth of slavery, and of democratic politics as a despicable exercise in moral compromise--I ask myself: Who, precisely, does Garrison hope to persuade by talking this way? And why did he spend so much time denouncing fellow abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith for their decision to pursue political means to abolition? Jim Oakes CUNY Graduate Center ----- End forwarded message -----
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