Lincoln and Taney

[Wild Bill]

Laurie, Dred Scott was not fugitive slave. He has nothing to do with the fugitive slave law or its constitutionality. His case ruled on on the extraterritoriality of slavery, that Missouri slave law followed Scott no matter where he lived and that slavery could not be denied in the treaties until after that territory became a state. It was a 7-2 ruling, but irrelevant to this argument. One can argue, as did Lincoln, that this was stretching the fugitive clause of the Constitution. But Scott remained a slave nom matter whee he went until his owner freed him, which Mrs. Emerson did after the case decision.

The relevant case here is Sherman Booth v. US Marshal Ableman and was decided 2 years after Dred Scott and did concern a runaway slave or a fugitive slave, if you prefer, under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Here the court ruled that the fugitive clause applied 9-0, and that Booth (no relation to JWB) violated the law by aiding the slave in question too escape to Canada, for which Ableman arrested him. Lincoln never argued that this case was a misapplication of the Constitution, just that it was unfair in its effects.

Taney is a very complicated man. We emphasize his 1850 cases on slavery but he was really best known for his insertion of Jacksonian Democracy into the cases decided earlier by Federalist John Marshall. This opened up the democratic notion of economic freedom to the general populace that the more elitist Federalists had stifled.