Skirmishes before the Civil War

WHEN James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, was inaugurated the fifteenth President of the United States on the 4th of March, 1857, and chose, for his constitutional advisers, Lewis Cass, Secretary of State; Howell Cobb, Secretary of the Treasury; John B. Floyd, Secretary of War; Isaac Toucey, Secretary of the Navy; Jacob Thompson, Secretary of the Interior; Aaron V. Brown, Postmaster-General, and Jeremiah S. Black, Attorney-General, a new era in the history of Our Country was begun. It was the beginning of a great political and social revolution in our republic which entirely and permanently changed the industrial aspects in many of the States of the Union.

It was during the administration of Mr. Buchanan that the preliminary skirmishes, moral and physical, which immediately preceded the late Civil War, occurred. Both parties were then putting on their armor and preparing their weapons for the mighty struggle. The political organization by which the new President had been elected had, for some time, coalesced with the friends and supporters of the slave-labor system in their efforts not only to extend the public domain so as to allow the almost indefinite expansion of their cherished institution, but to make it national. That coalition and sympathy were manifested in various ways. The two wings of the Democratic party (one of them leaning toward an anti-slavery policy and called the "Free-Soil Democracy") had been reconciled, and worked together in the national convention at Cincinnati in June, 1856, which nominated Mr. Buchanan for the Presidency. In their resolutions, put forth as a platform of principles, they approved the invasion and usurpation of Walker, in Nicaragua, as efforts of the people of Central America "to regenerate that portion of the continent which covers the passage across the interoceanic isthmus." They approved the doctrine of the "Ostend Manifesto," by resolving that "the Democratic party were in favor of the acquisition of Cuba," and Mr. Buchanan was chosen to be their standard-bearer because of his known sympathy with these movements for the extension of the area and perpetuation of the slave system. Senator A.G. Brown, of Mississippi, one of the committee appointed to call upon Mr. Buchanan and officially inform him of his nomination, wrote to a friend, saying: "In my judgment, Mr. Buchanan is as worthy of Southern confidence and Southern votes as ever Mr. Calhoun was."

One of the most vitally important skirmishes before the Civil War actually began occurred at about the time of Mr. Buchanan's accession to the Presidency of the Republic. It was of a moral and not of a physical nature, and is known in our judicial history as "the Dred Scott case."

Dred Scott was a young negro slave of Dr. Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army, living in Missouri. When the latter was ordered to Rock Island, in Illinois, in 1834, he took Scott with him. There Major Taliaferro, of the army, had a feminine slave, and when the two masters were transferred to Fort Snelling (now in Minnesota) next year, the two slaves were married with the consent of the masters. They had two children born in the free-labor Territory; and the mother had been bought by Dr. Emerson, who finally took parents and children back to Missouri, and there sold them to a New Yorker. Dred sued for his freedom, on the plea of his involuntary residence in a free-labor State and Territory for several years, and the Circuit Court of St. Louis decided in his favor. The Supreme Court of Missouri reversed the decision of the inferior court, and it was carried, by an appeal, to the Supreme Court of the United States, then presided over by Roger B. Taney, a Maryland slaveholder. A majority of that court were in sympathy with the friends of the slave-labor system, and their decision, about to be given in 1856, was, for prudential reasons, with-held until after the Presidential election that year. When it was known that Buchanan was elected, the decision was made against Scott, but it was not promulgated until after the inauguration of the new President of the Republic. The decision, through the Chief Justice, declared that any person "whose ancestors were imported into this country and held as slaves" had no right to sue in any court of the United States; in other words, denying any right of citizenship to a person who had been a slave or was the descendant of a slave.

The only legitimate business of the court was to decide the question of jurisdiction in the case; but the Chief Justice, with the sanction of a majority of the court, further declared that the framers and supporters of the Declaration of Independence did not include the negro race in our country in the great proclamation that "all men are created equal;" that the patriots of the Revolution, and their progenitors "for more than a century before," regarded the negroes as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might lawfully be reduced to slavery for his (the white man's) benefit. The Chief Justice further declared that they were never spoken of except as property; and that in the days of our fathers, even emancipated blacks "were identified in the public mind with the race to which they belonged, and regarded as a part of the slave population rather than the free."