according to historian Don Fehrenbacher; Justice Peter Daniel of Virginia was “a brooding proslavery fanatic” and the other three were “unreserved defenders of slavery.” Because of this “emotional commitment so intense that it made perception and logic utterly subservient,” the Dred Scott decision was “essentially visceral in origin . . . a work of unmitigated partisanship, polemical in spirit [with an] extraordinary cumulation of error, inconsistency, and misrepresentation.”
