Slavery, Law, and Politics
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/slaverylawpolitiOOOOfehr
SLAVERY,
LAW,
AND POLITICS
The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Toronto Melbourne
1981
Oxford University Press
Oxford London Glasgow New York Toronto Melbourne Wellington Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Kuala Lumpur Singapore Jakarta Hong Kong Tokyo Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Copyright © 1981 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
This book is an abridged edition of The Dred Scott Case:
Its Significance in American Law and Politics, Copyright © 1978 by Oxford University Press, Inc. First published by Oxford University Press, 1981 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1981
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Fehrenbacher, Don Edward, 1920- Slavery, law, and politics.
Abridged ed. of the author’s The Dred Scott case, its significance in American law and politics. Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Slavery in the United States—Law and legislation. 2. Scott, Dred. 3. Slavery in the United States—Legal status of slaves in free states.
I. Title.
KF4545.S5F432 346.730F3 80-25574
ISBN 0-19-502882-1 ISBN 0-19-502883-X (pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America
For
Virginia with love
This book is an abridged edition, with some minor revisions, of The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (Oxford University Press, 1978). In order to retain as much of the original text as possible within the desired limit on total length, it has seemed advisable to dispense with documentation entirely. Anyone who wants badly to know the authority for a particular statement or the source of a particular quotation can find it, with just a little trouble, in The Dred Scott Case. Footnotes aside, this abridgment is approximately half the length of the original volume but incorporates all of its chapters and major themes. I have cut much illustrative and collateral material and have found it disconcertingly easy to make stylistic economies. The result is a book less rich in detail but more to the point- suitable, I hope, for academic use and for the enlightenment of the general reader.
Again I acknowledge with gratitude the help of Charles Lofgren, Carl N. Degler, Walter Ehrlich, Robert W. Johannsen, William M. Wiecek, Carol Clifford, Virginia Fehrenbacher, and Sheldon Meyer and the editorial staff of Oxford University Press. Also Green Library, the Law School Library, the Institute of American History, and the office staff of the Department of History at Stanford University; the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Library of the United States Supreme Court, the
VI11
Preface
Missouri Historical Society, the Maryland Historical Society, the Ohio State Library, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina Library, and the University of Virginia Library; the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Journal of Southern History for permission to reprint in Chapter X some of the material that first appeared in my article, “Roger B. Taney and the Sectional Crisis,” XLIII (November 1977), 555-66, copyright 1977 by the Southern Historical Association.
November 1980 D.E.F.