Dred Scott and the election of Lincoln

In 1857, the Supreme Court delivered one of its most damaging rulings ever in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott, an enslaved man who had lived for years in free territory with his enslaver, sued for his freedom on the grounds that living on free soil had made him free. Chief Justice Roger Taney's majority opinion went much further than simply denying Scott's claim: it ruled that Black Americans, enslaved or free, could never be U.S. citizens and had no right to sue in federal court at all, and it declared the Missouri Compromise itself unconstitutional, since Congress, the Court said, had no power to ban slavery in the territories. The ruling inflamed Northern opinion and convinced many that slavery's defenders now controlled even the courts.

The following year, Abraham Lincoln, a relatively unknown Illinois Republican, challenged incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas to a series of debates across Illinois. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but the Lincoln-Douglas debates made him a national figure, sharply questioning whether popular sovereignty could really coexist with the Dred Scott ruling's logic. By the election of 1860, the Democratic Party had split into northern and southern factions, nominating separate candidates, while a new party called the Constitutional Union Party ran a fourth candidate hoping to avoid the slavery question altogether. Lincoln, running for the Republican Party on a platform opposing slavery's expansion (though not yet calling for its immediate end where it already existed), won the presidency in a four-way race without a single electoral vote from the South -- proof, to many southern leaders, that the North could now control the national government without southern consent at all, and several states began planning secession before he even took office.