The
more pressing danger lay in the results of such general Republican
success on the Supreme Court. The decision of that Court in the Dred
Scott case had fully sustained every point of the extreme Southern
claims as to the status of slavery in the Territories; it had held that
slaves were property in the view of the Constitution; that Congress
was bound to protect slave-holders in this property right in the
Territories, and, still more, bound not to prohibit slavery or allow a
Territorial Legislature to prohibit slavery in the Territories, and
that the Missouri compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional and void.
The Southern Democrats entered the election of 1860 with this distinct
decision of the highest judicial body of the country to back them. The
Republican party had refused to admit that the decision of the Dred
Scott case was law or binding. Given a Republican majority in both
Houses and a Republican President, there was nothing to hinder the
passage of a law increasing the number of Supreme Court justices to any
desired extent, and the new appointments would certainly be of such
a nature as to make the reversal of the Dred Scott decision an easy
matter. The election of 1860 had brought only a Republican President;
the majority in both Houses was to be against him until 1863 at least.
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