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“Heroes . . . who lost the fight”: Lea VanderVelde on Dred Scott


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“Heroes . . . who lost the fight”: Lea VanderVelde on Dred Scott
Posted Mon, May 12th, 2014 12:09 pm by Kali Borkoski

512px-Dred_Scott_photograph_circa_1857.jOn May 1, Lea VanderVelde of the University of Iowa College of Law delivered the first lecture in the Supreme Court Historical Society’s 2014 Leon Silverman Lecture series, hosted by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. VanderVelde’s topic was “Dred Scott in context.”

 

Dred Scott, a slave, famously sued for his freedom in Missouri prior to the Civil War. It was the only case of a slave suing a master to reach the Supreme Court. The Court’s holding in Scott’s case that slaves were not citizens and could not sue in the courts later earned Dred Scott v. Sandford – which retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor once described as “that terrible case” — the unenviable distinction of being one of the Court’s most discredited decisions.

 

“It’s not surprising that a slave would lose,” VanderVelde told the audience, “but it is surprising that he would sue,” given the fundamentally passive role of slaves. VanderVelde went on to explain that “the circumstances were bleached out” of the litigation: the statement of facts in Scott’s case was stipulated on appeal and then repeated verbatim by the Justices, making it unclear how and why this unusual litigation even came about Scissors-32x32.pnghttp://www.scotusblog.com/2014/05/heroes-who-lost-the-fight-lea-vandervelde-on-dred-scott/

 

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If You Can Find it

The Emergence of Lincoln, Vol. 2: Prologue to Civil War, 1859-1861 Hardcover – January 1, 1950
by Allan Nevins

"Violence was an American tradition," Allan Nevins reminds us at the beginning of this chronicle of the eve of the Civil War. On October 16, 1859 John Brown and seventeen of his followers seized the armory and arsenal at Harper's Ferry. They had counted on an uprising of the slaves. There was no uprising. On December 2, Brown was hanged after a fair trail. To certain Northern zealots he was a martyr; to Allan Nevins he was a victim of his own reasoning insanity. The Union had not long to live. In the following summer Southern hotheads bolted the Democratic convention at Charleston that nominated Stephen A. Douglas for President. When America went to the polls, Douglas faced not only Abraham Lincoln, but also the hotheads' favorite John H. Breckenridge, and John Bell, the candidate of the Constitutional Unionists. South Carolina's response to Lincoln's election was immediate. On December 20, 1860 the Palmetto state was the first to secede from the Union. 524 pages with illustrations.





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Alan Deals with this in chapter 4......Highly recommended. Actually the whole set (8 volumes) is good, and well worth the effort tracking them down.

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