In some cases, a presidential obstruction
of justice can be hidden from public view, while still having immense
consequences. One such case reached its climax on the eve of the American Civil
War.
In1857, U.S. President-elect James Buchanan
secretly interfered with how the Supreme Court would rule on the status of a
slave by the name of Dred Scott. The U.S. was descending into deepening
conflict as a consequence of the twinned issues of slavery and the status of
slavery in territories of the U.S. that were not yet states.
Dred Scott’s owner, a doctor from Missouri,
had taken him for a time to a territory within the U.S. where slavery was
illegal.
Following the death of his owner in 1843, Dred
Scott tried to gain freedom from his new owner, the doctor’s widow. A Missouri
Court reached a verdict in Scott’s favour, ruling that a slave who had been
taken to free territory should be free. Scott’s new owner appealed to the
Missouri Supreme Court, which in turn ruled in her favour.
Eventually, Dred Scott appealed his case to
the Supreme Court of the United States.
James Buchanan, a pro slavery Democrat from
Pennsylvania, became convinced that the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Scott
case had to be rigged to settle the explosive issue of slavery in the
territories once and for all.
The court, at the time, had five southern
judges among its nine members. Buchanan
wanted to ensure that should the verdict go against Scott, it would not be seen
merely as a decision on behalf of the slave owning south. The president-elect wrote secretly to Supreme
Court Justice Robert Grier of Pennsylvania to urge him to side with the
southerners in the Scott case. Grier did
as he was asked and wrote back to Buchanan acknowledging that he was well aware
of the impropriety of what was being done.
“We will not let any others of our brethren know,” he wrote. He concluded that what had happened was
“contrary to our usual practice.” It was
obstruction of justice, pure and simple.
Then, a few days before Buchanan was
inaugurated in March 1857, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B.
Taney, who had been born into a wealthy slave owning family, told the
president-elect, in another blatant violation of the separation between the
judiciary and the executive branch, that the verdict was going to go against
Dred Scott. Armed with this prior knowledge, Buchanan stated disingenuously in
his inaugural address that when the verdict in the Scott case was announced in
a few days, “in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit.”
The victim in this shabby deal was a slave,
fighting for his freedom. In the court’s
majority opinion, Chief Justice Taney proclaimed that blacks were “so far
inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” He concluded that the rights proclaimed in
the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776 were not intended to apply to
black slaves.
But the verdict, so improperly reached, generated
a storm of protest across the North. Abraham Lincoln, then a rising Illinois
politician declared that he believed “the Dred Scott decision is
erroneous.” In his analysis of the case,
Lincoln pointed ahead to arguments he would make in his Gettysburg Address as
president of the United States during the Civil War. On the meaning of the Declaration of
Independence, he said its authors had considered that all men were created
equal, equal in “ ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.’ This they said, and this they meant.”
Buchanan’s obstruction fanned the flames of
conflict. The Dred Scott verdict helped drive the U.S. into the war that would
lead to the abolition of slavery.
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