 Several episodes ago, I briefly mentioned the story of Margaret Garner. Her story is worth returning to for a moment. Margaret Garner was the 22-year-old slave of a man named Archibald Gaines. She already had four children, and Gaines was almost certainly the father of the three youngest who had noticeably lighter skin than their oldest sibling. During a severe snowstorm in January of 1856, Margaret's husband Robert attached a sled to a pair of horses, and he and his family, like many slaves, took advantage of the weather to run away. They made it to Ohio, where the family took shelter with Margaret's relatives, former slaves themselves, named Elijah and Mary Kite. But the Garners had been followed by a posse of slave catchers who showed up at the Kite residence only hours after the Garners. Taking them in outside the window, Margaret took hold of a carving knife. While the slave catchers were banging on the door to the cabin, Margaret used the knife to slice the throat of her second youngest child, the two-year-old Mary Garner. She then turned to her mother-in-law, who the girl had been named after, and said, Before my children shall be taken back to Kentucky, I will kill them all. Her mother-in-law answered, I cannot help you kill them. With that, Margaret grabbed a coal shovel and moved to kill the rest of the children who were huddled against a wall, now both terrified of the slave catchers and their own mother. She started slamming the shovel against her two oldest children, Thomas and Samuel. She failed to kill them, but left them with a series of cuts and bruises before the slave catchers broke into the home. With her captors inside, Margaret turned to her nine-month-old daughter, Silla, and slammed the shovel into the infant's face. As she cocked her weapon back for a second blow, the men grabbed her, and unlike Mary, the baby survived. For killing her daughter, Margaret faced a murder charge in the state of Ohio. Abolitionist lawyer John Jalief took the case in defense of Margaret and the rest of her family, who were listed as accessories to the crime. He wanted to make the case about the fugitive slave law, arguing in front of a northern jury that the law had driven a mother to such desperation as to take the life of her child, rather than see them be recaptured. The jury found Garner and her husband guilty of murder. The murder trial was quickly followed by the fugitive slave trial to return the Garner's to Archibald Gaines. In remarkably unusual circumstances, Margaret Garner was allowed to take the witness stand to testify on behalf of her children in their own case under the Fugitive Slave Act, this being the only time in which a black person was allowed to give a testimony in the Fugitive Slave case. Like the vast majority of fugitive slave cases, the Garner's were returned to slavery. But the Garner trial received massive attention. So many people flocked to witness the trial, that they crowded the streets outside of the courtroom and hundreds of men had to be deputized to keep the peace. The closing arguments for the murder trial took place on February 6th. The fugitive slave trial began on February 8th. In the day between these two trials, on February 7th, 1856, Montgomery Blair filed a brief with the Supreme Court to decide the fate of a slave named Dred Scott. In historical memory, no court case is more significant and more infamous than Dred Scott v. Sandford. But on February 7th, when the brief was filed, Dred Scott was a figure obscured by the case of Margaret Garner and her family, which consumed national attention. But by the time the final verdict was given on the Dred Scott case, he would be, in many ways, the most significant slave in United States history. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast to historical controversies. In the previous episode, we looked at the election of 1856, and I ended the show with reference to James Buchanan's inaugural address in which he promised to accept the ruling by the Supreme Court regarding the Missouri Compromise. In fact, it wasn't even a ruling at all, it was simply an opinion given off the topic of a different case regarding Dred Scott. The story of Scott v. Sandford is really three stories. One is the story of Dred Scott himself, the second is the story of the court case, and the third is the story of the ramifications of the court case on the sectional crisis that was already seething over things like the Kansas, Nebraska, and fugitive slave acts. Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia. Like many slaves, we don't know his exact date of birth, but it was probably in the year 1800. Scott's owner, Peter Blow, took his slaves with him when he moved to Alabama in 1818 and then to St. Louis, Missouri in 1830. Two years later, Blow died. Dred Scott was purchased in 1833 by an army surgeon named John Emerson. For the next three years, Dred Scott worked for his new master at Ford Armstrong, which was in Illinois, a free state. It's possible that had Scott claimed his freedom during these three years, his freedom would have been recognized under the Constitution of Illinois, but Scott didn't try to claim his freedom. We don't know why some people claim that he was content enough while working under Emerson that he didn't want his freedom. I find this to be a spurious claim myself, and it's one that's based on a commonly circulated but historically ridiculous misconception. As a bit of a sidebar, I've seen a meme shared around on social media by a relatively prominent libertarian page that I won't name, but is one that I've seen circulate some embarrassingly false history in the past. But this graphic was widely shared, so I saw it a number of times, and it said something to the degree that most slaves were so content in their slavery because food, shelter, and clothes were provided for them that they didn't even want freedom. Usually the meme is trying to make a point that welfare programs and essentially any government provided good or service is something that people are unwilling to give up because they can't imagine obtaining this stuff without the government. But even if that may be true for welfare programs or government nationalized industries, the comparison to slaves in the 19th century United States is patently false. At Hardly Even, Warren's discrediting, especially since I spent three episodes on the Fugitive Slave Law, and the very existence of the Fugitive Slave Law and the controversy over enforcing it, would bring this narrative into question. If slaves were so afraid of freedom, why would such a law need enforcement? Why would Southerners form mandatory slave patrols to suppress slave rebellions? Why were border slaves traded at a discount, which was due to the higher risk of slave runaways? It's genuinely embarrassing to see stuff like this circulating around as if it's sound historical fact when the opposite is so clearly true. In fact, when arguing with one person on this graphic, which is a mistake, I always regret getting into arguments on the internet, but I fell into one this time. The guy defending the claim that slaves were content in their slavery sent me a link of a very famous slave letter from Jordan Anderson to his former master, Colonel P. H. Anderson. And it's a funny story to mention because it's evidence of the all too common habit of people linking things and arguments they haven't actually read, or maybe just read the first bit of because this former slave was being sarcastic. So he sent this letter after the war and Anderson had written to a slave to try to get him to come back and work for him. And Jordan tells the Colonel that he was glad he was safe because he didn't want to hear of him being hurt. And it sounds like he was a content slave who loved his former master until you continue reading. And he says that he's willing to come work for him on the condition that he received back pay for all the years he was enslaved. And the letter ends by saying, quote, say howdy to George Carter and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me. So Jordan Anderson, far from expressing his contentment as a slave and love for his former master was sarcastically ridiculing the man for offering to hire him after a emancipation. So this idea that slaves were afraid of freedom is absolutely ridiculous and in the case of Dred Scott, it's far more likely that he simply didn't know that the possibility of claiming his freedom while he was at Fort Armstrong was even an option. So in 1836, the army abandoned Fort Armstrong and Dr. Emerson and Dred Scott ended up at Fort Snelling, which was in modern Minnesota, but was at the time the Wisconsin Territory that had only been created through the Wisconsin Enabling Act two weeks prior to Emerson and Scott's move there. Thus, according to the Missouri Compromise, slavery should not have even been legal in this area. But this law banning slavery had never even been attempted to be enforced. So Scott remained in the service of Emerson the entire time they were at Fort Snelling. Even had Scott known about the law and since he was illiterate, it's doubtful that he did, Fort Snelling was in a pretty remote region of the country and it's doubtful that he could have found anybody to help him with the case anyway. So Scott remained at Fort Snelling until 1838 and while he was there, he married Harriet Robinson. Robinson was owned by an Indian agent named Major Lawrence Teleofaro, if I'm pronouncing that right, who was also a justice of the peace. So he performed a wedding ceremony for the two slaves. It's worth mentioning that slave marriages were not technically legally recognized, but the ceremonies were common and slave spouses owned by different people were often allowed to visit each other, particularly on Sundays. And it's generally assumed that this was a way of maintaining peace among the slaves and disincentivizing rebellion or escape. But eventually Scott's lawyers would argue that the marriage ceremony was proof that both Emerson and Talia Faro already viewed the pair as being free, which was frankly untrue and it wasn't a very sound legal argument. The fact that they were living in a territory north of the Missouri Compromise Line was a far more valid legal argument. Courts typically made a distinction between bringing slaves into a free area and bringing slavery into a free area. Since Emerson was actually hiring Scott out to other people, he was, according to this distinction, bringing slavery into a free territory rather than just bringing his own slaves. So this would be a legal argument with an established precedent. Emerson himself was moved to Fort Jessup in Louisiana in 1837, but he allowed Scott to stay in the Wisconsin territory and simply collected the wages paid for Scott's labor. In February of 1838, Emerson himself also got married to a woman named Eliza Irene Sanford. Her name was actually spelled S-A-N-F-O-R-D. The reason there is an extra D in the court case is because of a transcription error. So we basically have a typo forever established in one of the most significant Supreme Court cases in US history. A few months after the wedding, Emerson decided to bring his slaves to Louisiana, which apparently included Harriet Scott at this time. So the couple traveled down the Mississippi River to rejoin their owner, where they did not stay for long before the army moved Emerson back to Fort Snelling. And during the trip back to Fort Snelling, Harriet Scott gave birth to a daughter she named Eliza after Emerson's wife. So like I pointed out a few episodes ago, pretty much everybody was named Eliza back then. Harriet actually gave birth while on a boat on the Mississippi River traveling to Fort Snelling. In May of 1840, the army sent Emerson to Florida to help in the Second Seminole War. And on the way there, he dropped his slaves off at St. Louis where they stayed with his wife. In 1842, the army finally discharged Emerson and he moved back to St. Louis. Eventually he actually moved out to Iowa, free territory, but he left the Scots in St. Louis where they were hired out to people. But in 1843, Emerson died at the age of 40. So now Irene Emerson. She went by her middle name Irene, I should mention. Now Irene Emerson owned the Scots who continued to hire them out. It was common for hired out slaves to work for money and only pay a percentage of the wages to the owners' rent. I have an article on the Mises Wire where I talk about some interesting examples of this, basically to show how it parallels taxation today as many slaves of this nature enjoyed all the freedoms of free citizens except the rents they had to pay to their owners. So Scott was able to save up some money with which he tried to purchase his freedom from Irene. But she actually refused to sell him his freedom. So now for whatever reason, Scott decided to sue her for the freedom of himself, his wife Harriet, and their two daughters, Harriet had given birth to a second daughter named Lizzie. We don't exactly know why Scott only now decided to sue for his freedom, but it's likely that the sons of his former master Peter Blow had actually informed him of his legal claim as they had grown up with Dred Scott and they eventually did help him gain his freedom even after he lost the suit many years later. So the Missouri courts had a pretty well-established set of precedents on suits like Scott's. In 1818, a slave woman named Winnie sued for her freedom in the Missouri courts after she had been taken to Illinois. And the Missouri court freed her and the state supreme court had upheld the decision. Between that case and Dred Scott's, the Missouri courts saw 10 other similar cases and they had always ruled in favor of the slave making Missouri one of the most liberal courts in the country on these matters. More than 100 Missouri slaves had gained their freedom after living or working for some time in a free state. So the first case was ruled in June of 1847 and it ruled against Scott on a weird technicality. Scott was suing Irene Emerson, but Emerson was unable to provide any witness a testing that she actually owned the slave. So in a weird bit of logic, the jury was essentially saying that because Emerson could not prove she owned the slaves, the slaves had no grounds to sue her for her freedom. So the jury ruled that they weren't freed, thus recognizing and enforcing her ownership of them. So Scott's attorneys obviously challenged this ruling and the Missouri circuit court overturned the ruling and sided with Scott. But the actual decision was delayed until 1850 because of the cholera outbreak, a major fire and the legal battle itself. So the ruling came basically as the country was entering the chaotic and controversial episode that would follow the compromise of 1850. Irene Emerson challenged the new decision and the case was set to go to the Missouri Supreme Court. More importantly to the Scott case is that while the appeal was being delayed, Irene married a physician named Calvin Chaffee who leaned anti-slavery and would eventually join the Republican party. He wasn't incredibly anti-slavery so he's another one of these very, very moderate anti-slavery Republicans. But Irene moved to Massachusetts to live with her new husband and her brother, John Sanford, continued to handle a court case even though Irene was still technically the defendant. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled on the case in 1852 overturning the circuit court and returning the Scots to slavery. The fact that this occurred after 1850 is important. The state of Missouri had a long track record that should have made Scott's case open and shut, ruling him free. But after the controversy over slavery started to explode following the compromise of 1850, the Dred Scott case became vastly more political. The Missouri court changed in its composition where it had been an appointed court. It was now an elected one. There were three judges on the court and two of the new electees were pro-slavery Democrats. Their decision clearly ignored Missouri precedent in order to give a politically motivated ruling. This is especially clear through the statement given by one of the judges, William Scott, who said, quote, times are not now as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made. Since then, not only individuals but states have been possessed with a dark and fell spirit in relation to slavery, whose gratification is sought in the pursuit of measures, whose inevitable consequences must be the overthrow and destruction of our government. Under such circumstances, it does not behoove the state of Missouri to show the least countenance to any measure which might gratify this spirit. She is willing to assume her full responsibility for the existence of slavery within her limits, nor does she seek to share or divide it with others. End quote. In 1854, Scott's new lawyer, Roswell Field, started working on the new case. One of his previous lawyers had died and the other had moved to another state. So that's why he ended up working with Roswell Field. While the previous case was being litigated, it's worth noting, Dred Scott was held in the custody of the St. Louis Sheriff, who had been renting the Scots out and holding onto the rents. Whoever won the case was legally due the accumulated cash. So in the new case, went to the U.S. Circuit Court in 1854, Scott was being rented by Charles LeBombe, who was the brother-in-law of one of the sons of Peter Blow, Scott's first owner. At this point, they were directly involved in helping the Scots gain their freedom. And without LeBombe, they never would have obtained the legal services of Roswell Field. The new case was a suit against John Sanford in which he claimed battery and wrongful imprisonment and demanded $9,000 in damages. So of course, all they expected to settle for was a token sum of money. The Federal Circuit Court introduced an important element into the case. Before the court could even give a ruling, they have to decide whether they have jurisdiction to decide on the case to begin with. In the case of federal courts, the courts have jurisdiction in a few specific types of situations, including one called diversity jurisdiction, which is based on the first paragraph of Article III, Section II of the Constitution. This allows the federal courts to hear cases between citizens of different states. Dred Scott was claiming citizenship of Missouri, and John Sanford was a citizen of the state of New York. He had business ties to St. Louis, but he was a New York citizen. Sanford did not deny his New York citizenship, but he did deny that Dred Scott was a citizen of Missouri. His argument was that Scott resided in Missouri, but since he was a slave, he couldn't be a citizen. This is important in understanding the case, because if Sanford is correct, then the Circuit Court would be upholding the slavery question and deciding the citizenship question by denying jurisdiction. But if the court accepted the case, they were necessarily saying that Scott was a citizen, which would imply that slaves could sue their masters as part of their citizenship rights. Sanford's lawyers argued that because Dred Scott was of African descent, he would not be a citizen. Judge Wells of the Circuit Court rejected this argument. Wells was not opposed to slavery, but he did not accept the idea that blacks had no legal rights at all, which is what Sanford's legal team was effectively arguing. His claim was also not that slaves were citizens. He simply believed that the U.S. Constitution recognized the citizenship of free blacks, so he avoided the issue of recognizing a slave's right to sue. The question then was whether or not Dred Scott was already free in the eyes of the law. Judge Wells instructed the jury to decide the case according to Missouri law, which made the decision easy for them since Missouri Supreme Court had already ruled that Scott was a slave, so the jury simply upheld the decision. So now, Dred Scott had one final place to take his case, and that was the U.S. Supreme Court. A Supreme Court case was too expensive for the blows to finance, but fortunately for Scott, there was a lawyer willing to take the case for free, and that was somebody who I mentioned in the previous episode, Montgomery Blair. The son of Francis Blair and the lawyer who handled the land dispute for John C. Vermont. Blair was taking the case for political reasons, if you remember, he was like his father, a lifelong Democrat, but he was part of the free soil wing, and the case was a way for him to take the territorial question of slavery to the Supreme Court. Blair sought help from other attorneys, but the anti-slavery folk were surprisingly unconcerned with the Dred Scott case, which they would obviously see as a miscalculation after the ruling finally came out. It wasn't uncommon for anti-slavery lawyers to take on individual cases either, so it's surprising even if they didn't know the ramifications of the ruling beforehand, but Blair was pretty much on his own. The appeal to the Supreme Court was made in December of 1854, so the case was held over until the next term, and they took the case a year later. They didn't actually hear arguments for the case until February of 1856, so keep in mind that this was now a decade-long legal battle over Scott and his family's freedom. In May, the court put off the decision until the next year to schedule rearguments focusing on the jurisdictional citizenship question. Now I should mention here that I am not a legal scholar, so I want to do my best to relay the historical facts of the case, but the legal reasoning and some of the jargon that you see in these histories are outside of my expertise, so take with a grain of salt any of the legal nuances of the history, but I'm gonna handle this part of the episode as well as I can. And the new arguments, Blair finally got help from another lawyer named George Curtis, who was a moderate on slavery as well. Neither of Scott's lawyers were anything close to abolitionists. The concern from both men was that the court might overturn the Missouri Compromise, which people had largely expected, would eventually be ruled on by the courts ever since Douglas used the Kansas-Nebraska Act to assert that the Compromise of 1850 had already thrown it out, basically leaving it to the courts to sort this issue out. Now it's also worth addressing the delay in the ruling. The court delayed the ruling until after the election of 1856, which led to a conspiracy theory that the courts delayed to avoid giving weight to the Republicans prior to the election. It's possible that the court did want to wait until after the election was done to give such a high-profile ruling. But the conspiracy theory, which was held by Abraham Lincoln and alluded to in his famous House Divided Speech he gave in 1858, was unlikely. One of the Supreme Court justices who supported the delay was John McClain, who was a contender for the Republican Party nomination, in fact. So the slave power conspiracy theory is weak to say the least. When the court finally gave its ruling, it deliberately opted to address the controversial question. This was not originally the plan. Justice Samuel Nelson was originally going to give the opinion of the court, and he started drafting his opinion in February of 1857. This opinion ended up being a concurring opinion, but it addressed none of the major national controversies. But the pro-slavery judges that made up the majority of the court wanted a ruling on the Missouri Compromise. So the majority opinion was passed to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney instead. Taney was expected to settle the conflicts on three questions. First, could free blacks sue in federal courts as U.S. citizens? Second, was the Missouri Compromise constitutional? In other words, did Congress have the power to regulate slavery in the territories? And third, did Scott's residency in Illinois or the Wisconsin territory obligate Missouri to recognize his freedom? The first question was a paradox for any pro-slavery judge who wanted to assert a political decision. If it was decided that free blacks could sue and thus the court had jurisdiction, it was implicit that he was not a slave. If he was a slave, it was already accepted that he could not sue and the court had no jurisdiction. So by accepting the case, it should have already been a foregone conclusion that Scott was legally free. But if Taney rejected the court's jurisdiction, he would not be able to write an opinion settling the Missouri Compromise question. So Taney accepted that the court had jurisdiction, but then his opinion for the citizenship question apparently contradicted the jurisdictional decision. Taney's opinion said this, quote, the question is simply this, can a Negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States and as such become entitled to all the rights and privileges and immunities guaranteed by that instrument to the citizens. One of which writes is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution, end quote. To answer this question, Taney offered a lengthy and slanted overview of history. In it, he concluded that black people, whether free or not, quote, had for more than a century before been regarded 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 justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at the time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing or supposed to be open to dispute and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits as well as in matters of public concern without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion, end quote. Now this of course is a ridiculous view of history even at the time. At the time of ratification of the Constitution, six states allowed blacks to vote in some capacity. If you remember from a previous episode, I mentioned that Garrett Smith donated land in New York to free blacks to help enfranchise them according to New York law. And Britain had already abolished slavery at this time as well. But Taney's arguments held that even if a black person was the citizen of a specific state, this did not grant national citizenship rights. In Justice Curtis's dissent, he argued correctly, I think, but again, I'm not a legal scholar, that if Taney's opinion were true, the Supreme Court didn't have jurisdiction over the case to begin with. But this didn't stop Taney from tackling the question of the Missouri Compromise. Taney handled the Missouri Compromise by invoking the territorial clause and the Fifth Amendment. The Territory's Clause of the Constitution, article four, section three, clause two, allows Congress to regulate territories, but the Fifth Amendment protects the property of citizens of the United States. Therefore, according to Taney, Congress did not have the authority to prevent slave owners from taking their property to any territory and any territorial legislation that would do this was necessarily invalid. Thus, the Missouri Compromise was struck down and all the territories were now open to slavery. But the corollary effect of Taney's opinion was to undermine everything Stephen Douglas had been working for the past seven years. Douglas was the champion of popular sovereignty, the idea that people of the territory could decide on whether or not to allow slavery. Taney basically said that even this was illegal. Territorial governments could not pass laws to prohibit slavery until after the territory gained statehood. When Douglas left it to the courts to decide the issue of the Missouri Compromise, he obviously never expected them to throw out popular sovereignty as well. And this would be thrown back at him during the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the presidential campaign of 1860. This brings us back to Buchanan's inaugural address. In the address, he said that he was going to respect the decision on the Missouri Compromise, however it was ruled. Before the address, he exchanged words with Judge Taney and many people, such as Lincoln, pointed to this as evidence of the slave power conspiracy, assuming that Taney told Buchanan how the court was going to rule. The ruling, by the way, was made public only two days later. The reality is that we have no idea what Taney said to Buchanan, but he probably wasn't talking about the Dred Scott case and that's because it wouldn't have even been necessary. We do know that Buchanan knew of the ruling prior to his giving the inaugural address. Justices John Katrin and Robert Greer had exchanged letters with Buchanan about the court's decision. Even if Taney did share with Buchanan what the court was going to reveal two days later, it would not have added any new information for the president. Before I talk about the fallout of the Dred Scott decision, I want to close out on the story of Scott and his family. After the court's final decision, the Scots were put back in the custody of John Sanford, but at this point it wasn't clear if John owned the Scots or if his sister Irene still owned them. She hadn't really been a part of the case for years now. So when John Sanford died in May of 1857, the ownership of the Scots was entirely unclear. Calvin Chaffee, Irene's husband, if you remember, had anti-slavery leanings, so he sold the ownership of Scots to Taylor Blow, the son of Peter Blow, for the token sum of $1. Because of the confusing question of ownership, Chaffee used a quick-claim deed, which basically said that he and Irene had abandoned any ownership claim. On May 26th, 1857, Taylor Blow officially manumitted the Scots. Dred Scott, his wife Harriet, and their two daughters were officially free after 10 years in courts that consistently upheld their status as slaves, with only one exception in the Lower Missouri Court. The day after they officially became free, Chaffee's lawyers claimed all of the accumulated earnings of the Scots during the court case. So when I say that Chaffee had anti-slavery leanings and later became a Republican, there's no need to think too highly of them. His anti-slavery sentiment was modest at best, and he had no moral qualms about keeping all of Scots earnings. Dred and Harriet lived in St. Louis, and Dred Scott was a local celebrity for the rest of his life, which wasn't much longer as he died of tuberculosis on September 17th, 1858. Harriet didn't die until two decades later. The fallout from the Dred Scott ruling was swift and intense. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for many abolitionists who began to question their pacifist beliefs. I could give many stories regarding the outrage that followed the ruling, and some of the fallout will be taken up in later episodes due to the conspiracy theories that drove people to vote Republican in 1860, but today I simply want to talk about Lysander Spooner's reaction. Most libertarians today who know of Spooner know of his no-treason pamphlets, or at least they know of the third no-treason pamphlet, which is actually numbered as the sixth, but pamphlets three, four, and five were never published. So the third pamphlet titled The Constitution of No Authority is his most famous exposition of his anarchist views. But Spooner was a late in life anarchist. In 1845, he published the Unconstitutionality of Slavery, and in it he actually uses the word anarchy in a negative sense. In the review of this work, Garrison criticized Spooner's devotion to the Constitution, which he now considered a compact with evil. So prior to the Dred Scott ruling, Spooner was very much a limited government guy, but he was not an anarchist and he was still a constitutionalist. The Dred Scott ruling may not have turned him yet into an anarchist. I contend that the Civil War did this, but this is based on my own scholarship on the subject, but the Dred Scott ruling clearly turned him against the Constitution. His most famous quote today is the one from his no-treason pamphlet where he says, but whether the Constitution really be one thing or another, this much is certain, that it has either authorized such a government as we have had or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist. So Dred Scott v. Sanford appears to be a significant turning point in Spooner's thinking. After the ruling, he quickly wrote up two essays. The first, Targeting the North, was titled A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, and the second essay had the audience in the title, which was To the Non-Slaveholders of the South. He published these essays as a broadside with one essay on one side and the other essay on the opposite side. He then had them delivered all over the country, hoping to incite resistance to slavery in both sections of the country. Those Southern postmasters would simply destroy these to keep them from circulating. Spooner only ceased distribution of his broadside after he met with John Brown in Boston, where Brown requested that he stop distributing the broadside because it would only encourage the Southerners to increase their slave patrols, which would undermine his plan to take the war into Africa, as Brown liked to refer to his plan to conduct guerrilla warfare in the Southern states. So while the Dred Scott ruling may have seemed like a victory for Southern slaveholders, it was simply one more event that would divide the North and the South and fan the flames in the sectional crisis. Now, James Buchanan was in office and the Supreme Court had officially ruled that no territory could legally be closed to slavery. But while this was going on, New Englanders continued to migrate to Kansas, and we will continue the story of Kansas and the border war in the next episode. For more content like this, visit mesus.org.