During America's turbulent antebellum era, the Supreme Court
decided important cases--most famously Dred Scott--that spoke to
sectional concerns and shaped the nation's response to the slavery
question. Much scholarship has been devoted to individual cases and
to the Taney Court, but this is the first comprehensive examination
of the major slavery cases that came before the Court between 1825
and 1861.
Earl Maltz presents a detailed analysis of all eight cases and
explains how each fit into the slavery politics of its time,
beginning with The Antelope, heard by the John Marshall Court, and
continuing with the seven other cases taken before the Roger Taney
Court: The Amistad, Groves v. Slaughter, Prigg v. Pennsylvania,
Strader v. Graham, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Ableman v. Booth, and
Kentucky v. Denison.
Case by case, Maltz identifies the political and legal forces
that shaped each of the judicial outcomes while clarifying the
evolution of the Court's slavery-related jurisprudence. He reveals
the beliefs of each justice about the morality of slavery and the
judicial role in constitutional cases to show how their actions
were determined by a complex interaction of political and doctrinal
considerations. Thus he offers a more nuanced understanding of the
antebellum federal judiciary, showing how the decision in Prigg
hinged on views about federalism as well as attitudes toward human
freedom, while the question of which slaves were freed in The
Antelope depended more on complex fact-finding than on a
condemnation of the slave trade. Maltz also challenges the view
that the Taney Court simply mirrored Southern interests and argues
that, despite Dred Scott, the overall record of the Court was not
particularly proslavery.
Although the progression of the Court's decisions reflects a
change in the tenor of the conflict over slavery, the aftermath of
those decisions illustrates the limits of the Court's ability to
change the dynamic that governed political struggles over such
divisive issues. As the first accessible account of all of these
cases, "Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861" underscores the
Court's limited capability to resolve the intractable political
conflicts that sharply divided our nation during this period.
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