ON MARCH 9, 1857, the New York Tribune announced the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case. “THE TRIUMPH OF SLAVERY COMPLETE,” declared one of its many headlines. The enslaved Scott had sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had resided in the free Wisconsin territory; Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled against him. Negroes, he wrote, “had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” What shocked the majority of the Northern public was not the blatant racism, but the implication that free states had no power to bar slavery within their borders.
