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The Compromise of 1850 admits California to the U.S. as a “free” state and allows newly acquired territories to decide upon slavery for themselves.

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Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a powerful anti-slavery novel.

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Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War".

Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome slavery.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel and the second best-selling book of the 19th century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies were sold in Great Britain. Eight power presses, running incessantly, could barely keep up with the demand. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, he declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." The quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has been argued that "the long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change."

The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of stereotypes about black people. These include the affectionate, dark-skinned " mammy"; the " pickaninny" stereotype of black children; and the " Uncle Tom", or dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his white master or mistress. In recent years, the negative associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a "vital antislavery tool."

Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, wrote the novel as a response to the passage, in 1850, of the second Fugitive Slave Act. Much of the book was composed in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, taught at his , Bowdoin College.

Stowe was partly inspired to create Uncle Tom's Cabin by the slave narrative The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849). Henson, a formerly enslaved black man, had lived and worked on a 3,700-acre (15 km ²) plantation in North Bethesda, Maryland, owned by Isaac Riley. Henson escaped slavery in 1830 by fleeing to the Province of Upper Canada (now Ontario), where he helped other fugitive slaves settle and become self-sufficient, and where he wrote his memoirs. Stowe acknowledged in 1853 that Henson's writings inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin. When Stowe's work became a best-seller, Henson republished his memoirs as The Memoirs of Uncle Tom and traveled on lecture tours extensively in the United States and Europe. Stowe's novel lent its name to Henson's home- Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site, near Dresden, Ontario, Canada-which since the 1940s has been a museum. The cabin where Henson lived while he was enslaved no longer exists, but a cabin on the Riley farm erroneously thought to be the Henson Cabin was purchased by the Montgomery County, Maryland, government in 2006. It is now a part of the National Park Service National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program, and plans are underway to build a museum and interpretive center on the site.

American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a volume co-authored by Theodore Dwight Weld and the Grimké sisters, is also a source of some of the novel's content. Stowe said she based the novel on a number of interviews with people who escaped slavery during the time when she was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state. In Cincinnati the Underground Railroad had local abolitionist sympathizers and was active in efforts to help runaway slaves on their escape route from the South.

Stowe mentioned a number of the inspirations and sources for her novel in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853). This non-fiction book was intended to verify Stowe's claims about slavery. However, later research indicated that Stowe did not read many of the book's cited works until after she had published her novel.

Publication

Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared as a 40-week serial in The National Era, an abolitionist periodical, starting with the June 5, 1851, issue. It was originally intended as a shorter narrative that would run for only a few weeks. Stowe expanded the story significantly, however, and it was instantly popular, such that several protests were sent to the Era office when she missed an issue. Because of the story's popularity, the publisher John P. Jewett contacted Stowe about turning the serial into a book. While Stowe questioned if anyone would read Uncle Tom's Cabin in book form, she eventually consented to the request.

Convinced the book would be popular, Jewett made the unusual decision (for the time) to have six full-page illustrations by Hammatt Billings engraved for the first printing. Published in book form on March 20, 1852, the novel sold 3,000 copies on that day alone, and soon sold out its complete print run. A number of other editions were soon printed (including a deluxe edition in 1853, featuring 117 illustrations by Billings).

In the first year of publication, 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold. At that point, however, "demand came to an unexpected halt.... No more copies were produced for many years, and if, as is claimed, Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe in 1862 as 'the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war,' the work had effectively been out of print for many years." Jewett went out of business, and it was not until Ticknor and Fields put the work back in print in November 1862 that demand began again to increase.

The book was translated into all major languages, and in the United States it became the second best-selling book after the Bible. A number of the early editions carried an introduction by Rev James Sherman, a Congregational minister in London noted for his abolitionist views. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold equally well in Britain, with the first London edition appearing in May 1852 and selling 200,000 copies. In a few years over 1.5 million copies of the book were in circulation in Britain, although most of these were infringing copies (a similar situation occurred in the United States).

Eliza escapes with her son; Tom sold "down the river"

The book opens with a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby facing the loss of his farm because of debts. Even though he and his wife Emily Shelby believe that they have a benevolent relationship with their slaves, Shelby decides to raise the needed funds by selling two of them-Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children, and Harry, the son of Emily Shelby's maid Eliza-to Mr. Haley, a coarse slave trader. Emily Shelby is averse to this idea because she had promised her maid that her child would never be sold; Emily's son, George Shelby, hates to see Tom go because he sees the man as his friend and mentor.

When Eliza overhears Mr. and Mrs. Shelby discussing plans to sell Tom and Harry, Eliza determines to run away with her son. The novel states that Eliza made this decision because she fears losing her only surviving child (she had already miscarried two children). Eliza departs that night, leaving a note of apology to her mistress.

As Tom is sold, Mr. Haley takes him to a riverboat on the Mississippi River and from there Tom is to be transported to a slave market. While on board, Tom meets Eva, an angelic little white girl and quickly they become friends. Eva falls into the river and Tom dives into the river to save her life. Being grateful to Tom, Eva's father Augustine St. Clare buys him from Haley and takes him with the family to their home in New Orleans. Tom and Eva begin to relate to one another because of the deep Christian faith they both share.

Eliza's family hunted; Tom's life with St. Clare

During Eliza's escape, she meets up with her husband George Harris, who had run away previously. They decide to attempt to reach Canada. However, they are tracked by Tom Loker, a slave hunter hired by Mr. Haley. Eventually Loker and his men trap Eliza and her family, causing George to shoot him in the side. Worried that Loker may die, Eliza convinces George to bring the slave hunter to a nearby Quaker settlement for medical treatment.

Back in New Orleans, St. Clare debates slavery with his Northern cousin Ophelia who, while opposing slavery, is prejudiced against black people. St. Clare, however, believes he is not biased, even though he is a slave owner. In an attempt to show Ophelia that her views on blacks are wrong, St. Clare purchases Topsy, a young black slave, and asks Ophelia to educate her.

After Tom has lived with the St. Clares for two years, Eva grows very ill. Before she dies she experiences a vision of heaven, which she shares with the people around her. As a result of her death and vision, the other characters resolve to change their lives, with Ophelia promising to throw off her personal prejudices against blacks, Topsy saying she will better herself, and St. Clare pledging to free Tom.

Tom sold to Simon Legree

Before St. Clare can follow through on his pledge, however, he dies after being stabbed outside a tavern. His wife reneges on her late husband's vow and sells Tom at auction to a vicious plantation owner named Simon Legree. Tom is taken to rural Louisiana with other new slaves including Emmeline, whom Simon Legree has purchased to use as a sex slave.

Legree begins to hate Tom when Tom refuses Legree's order to whip his fellow slave. Legree beats Tom viciously and resolves to crush his new slave's faith in God. Despite Legree's cruelty, however, Tom refuses to stop reading his Bible and comforting the other slaves as best he can. While at the plantation, Tom meets Cassy, another slave whom Legree used as a sex slave. Cassy tells her story to Tom. She was previously separated from her son and daughter when they were sold. She became pregnant again but killed the child because she could not tolerate having another child separated from her.

Tom Loker, changed after being healed by the Quakers, returns to the story; he has helped George, Eliza, and Harry cross over into Canada from Lake Erie and become free. In Louisiana, Uncle Tom almost succumbs to hopelessness as his faith in God is tested by the hardships of the plantation. However, he has two visions, one of Jesus and one of Eva, which renew his resolve to remain a faithful Christian, even unto death. He encourages Cassy to escape, which she does, taking Emmeline with her. When Tom refuses to tell Legree where Cassy and Emmeline have gone, Legree orders his overseers to kill Tom. As Tom is dying, he forgives the overseers who savagely beat him. Humbled by the character of the man they have killed, both men become Christians. George Shelby, Arthur Shelby's son, arrives to buy Tom's freedom, but Tom dies shortly after they meet.

Final section

On their boat ride to freedom, Cassy and Emmeline meet George Harris' sister Madame de Thoux and accompany her to Canada. Madame de Thoux and George Harris were separated in their childhood. Cassy discovers that Eliza is her long-lost daughter who was sold as a child. Now that their family is together again, they travel to France and eventually Liberia, the African nation created for former American slaves. George Shelby returns to the Kentucky farm, where after his father's death, he frees all his slaves. George Shelby urges them to remember Tom's sacrifice every time they look at his cabin. He decides to lead a pious Christian life just as Uncle Tom did.

Major characters

Uncle Tom, the title character, was initially seen as a noble, long-suffering Christian slave. In more recent years, however, his name has become an epithet directed towards African-Americans who are accused of selling out to whites. Stowe intended Tom to be a "noble hero" and a praiseworthy person. Throughout the book, far from allowing himself to be exploited, Tom stands up for his beliefs and is grudgingly admired even by his enemies.

Eliza is a slave and personal maid to Mrs. Shelby, who escapes to the North with her five-year-old son Harry after he is sold to Mr. Haley. Her husband, George, eventually finds Eliza and Harry in Ohio and emigrates with them to Canada, then France, and finally Liberia.

The character Eliza was inspired by an account given at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati by John Rankin to Stowe's husband Calvin, a professor at the school. According to Rankin, in February 1838, a young slave woman, Eliza Harris, had escaped across the frozen Ohio River to the town of Ripley with her child in her arms and stayed at his house on her way farther north.

Evangeline St. Clare is the daughter of Augustine St. Clare. Eva enters the narrative when Uncle Tom is traveling via steamship to New Orleans to be sold, and he rescues the five- or six-year-old girl from drowning. Eva begs her father to buy Tom, and he becomes the head coachman at the St. Clare house. He spends most of his time with the angelic Eva. Eva often talks about love and forgiveness, convincing the dour slave girl Topsy that she deserves love. She even touches the heart of her Aunt Ophelia.

Eventually Eva falls terminally ill. Before dying, she gives a lock of her hair to each of the slaves, telling them that they must become Christians so that they may see each other in Heaven. On her deathbed, she convinces her father to free Tom, but because of circumstances the promise never materializes.

A similar character, also named Little Eva, later appeared in the children's novel Little Eva: The Flower of the South by Philip J. Cozans-although this ironically was an anti-Tom novel.

Simon Legree

Simon Legree is a cruel slave owner-a Northerner by birth-whose name has become synonymous with greed. He is arguably the novel's main antagonist. His goal is to demoralize Tom and break him of his religious faith; he eventually orders Tom whipped to death out of frustration for his slave's unbreakable belief in God. The novel reveals that, as a young man, he had abandoned his sickly mother for a life at sea and ignored her letter to see her one last time at her deathbed. He sexually exploits Cassy, who despises him, and later sets his designs on Emmeline.

It is unclear if Legree is based on any actual individuals. Reports surfaced after the 1870s that Stowe had in mind a wealthy cotton and sugar plantation owner named Meredith Calhoun, who settled on the Red River north of Alexandria, Louisiana. Generally, however, the personal characteristics of Calhoun ("highly educated and refined") do not match the uncouthness and brutality of Legree. Calhoun even edited his own newspaper, published in Colfax (originally "Calhoun's Landing"), which was renamed The National Democrat after Calhoun's death. However, Calhoun's overseers may have been in line with the hated Legree's methods and motivations.

Rev. Josiah Henson, inspiration for the character of Uncle Tom, said that "Legree, the slave-driver, was named Bryce Lytton." According to Lewis Clark, who claimed to be the original for the book's George Harris, Legree "is mostly a fellow named Bryce Lytton, who was overseer for Isaac Riley in Maryland. But his character was also made up out of the characters of several other persons." Journalist John Passmore Edwards, in Uncle Tom's Companions, of 1852, also names Lytton.

Other characters

These are the more notable of the secondary and minor characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin:

Arthur Shelby - Tom's master in Kentucky. Shelby is characterized as a "kind" slaveowner and a stereotypical Southern gentleman.

Emily Shelby - Arthur Shelby's wife. She is a deeply religious woman who strives to be a kind and moral influence upon her slaves and is appalled when her husband sells his slaves to a slave trader. As a woman, she has no legal way to stop this, as all property belongs to her husband.

George Shelby - Arthur's and Emily's son, who sees Tom as a friend and as the perfect Christian.

Chloe - Tom's wife and mother of his children.

Augustine St. Clare - Tom's third owner and father of Eva. St. Clare is complex, often sarcastic, with a ready wit. After a rocky courtship he marries a woman he grows to hold in contempt, though he is too polite to let it show. St. Clare recognizes the evil in chattel slavery but is not willing to relinquish the wealth it brings him. After his daughter's death he becomes more sincere in his religious thoughts and starts to read the Bible to Tom. He plans on finally taking action against slavery by freeing his slaves, but his good intentions ultimately come to nothing.

Marie St. Clare - Wife of Augustine, she is a self-absorbed woman without a hint of compassion for those around her, including her own family. Given to an unending list of (apparently imaginary) physical maladies, she continually complains about the lack of sympathy she is receiving. She has separated her personal maid, Mammy, from her own two children because they would interfere with her duties. As Marie drives Mammy to exhaustion, she criticizes her for selfishly seeking to attend her own family. Upon the unexpected death of Augustine, Marie countermands the legal process that would have given Tom his freedom.

George Harris - Eliza's husband. An intelligent and clever half-white slave who is fiercely loyal to his family.

Harry - Eliza's son. He is supposed to be sold to Mr. Haley by Mr. Arthur Shelby.

Topsy - A young slave girl. When asked if she knows who made her, she professes ignorance of both God and a mother, saying "I s'pect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me." She is transformed by Eva's love. During the early-to-mid 20th century, several doll manufacturers created Topsy and Topsy-type dolls. The phrase "growed like Topsy" (later "grew like Topsy") passed into the English language, originally with the specific meaning of unplanned growth, later sometimes just meaning enormous growth.

Miss Ophelia - Augustine St. Clare's pious, hard-working, abolitionist cousin from Vermont. She displays the ambiguities towards African-Americans felt by many Northerners at the time. She argues against the institution of slavery yet, at least initially, feels repulsed by the slaves as individuals.

Cassy - A light-skinned (quadroon) slave on Legree's plantation who has been sexually exploited by Legree. She is an embittered woman, pent on revenge, though somewhat softened by Uncle Tom's Christian faith. After Uncle Tom's death, she takes nonviolent revenge on Legree, suggesting to him that a building on his plantation is haunted, and thus contributing to his death. She is able to escape with Emmeline, a young slave girl, and finally finds her long-lost daughter, Eliza.

Prue - A depressed slave who was forced to let her child starve to death. She takes up drinking in her misery, and is ultimately beaten and killed for it.

Quimbo and Sambo - slaves of Simon Legree who act as overseers of the plantation. On orders from Legree, they savagely whip Tom but afterward tearfully repent of their deeds to Tom, who forgives them as he lies dying.

Mr. Haley - A coarse slave trader who buys slaves from Mr. Arthur Shelby.

Tom Loker - A slave hunter hired by Mr. Haley to catch Eliza and her son Harry.

Major themes

Uncle Tom's Cabin is dominated by a single theme: the evil and immorality of slavery. While Stowe weaves other subthemes throughout her text, such as the moral authority of motherhood and the redeeming possibilities offered by Christianity, she emphasizes the connections between these and the horrors of slavery. Stowe sometimes changed the story's voice so she could give a " homily" on the destructive nature of slavery (such as when a white woman on the steamboat carrying Tom further south states, "The most dreadful part of slavery, to my mind, is its outrages of feelings and affections-the separating of families, for example."). One way Stowe showed the evil of slavery was how this "peculiar institution" forcibly separated families from each other. One of the subthemes presented in the novel is temperance. Stowe made it somewhat subtle and in some cases she weaved it into events that would also support the dominant theme. One example of this is when Augustine St. Clare is killed, he attempted to stop a brawl between two inebriated men in a cafe and was stabbed. One other example is the death of the slave woman Prue who was whipped to death for being drunk on a consistent basis; however, her reasons for doing so is due to the loss of her baby. In the opening of the novel, the fates of Eliza and her son are being discussed between slave owners over wine. Considering that Stowe intended this to be a subtheme, this scene could foreshadow future events that put alcohol in a bad light.

Because Stowe saw motherhood as the "ethical and structural model for all of American life" and also believed that only women had the moral authority to save the United States from the demon of slavery, another major theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the moral power and sanctity of women. Through characters like Eliza, who escapes from slavery to save her young son (and eventually reunites her entire family), or Eva, who is seen as the "ideal Christian", Stowe shows how she believed women could save those around them from even the worst injustices. While later critics have noted that Stowe's female characters are often domestic clichés instead of realistic women, Stowe's novel "reaffirmed the importance of women's influence" and helped pave the way for the women's rights movement in the following decades.

Stowe's puritanical religious beliefs show up in the novel's final, overarching theme-the exploration of the nature of Christianity and how she feels Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with slavery. This theme is most evident when Tom urges St. Clare to "look away to Jesus" after the death of St. Clare's beloved daughter Eva. After Tom dies, George Shelby eulogizes Tom by saying, "What a thing it is to be a Christian." Because Christian themes play such a large role in Uncle Tom's Cabin -and because of Stowe's frequent use of direct authorial interjections on religion and faith-the novel often takes the "form of a sermon."

Uncle Tom's Cabin is written in the sentimental and melodramatic style common to 19th-century sentimental novels and domestic fiction (also called women's fiction). These genres were the most popular novels of Stowe's time and tended to feature female main characters and a writing style which evoked a reader's sympathy and emotion. Even though Stowe's novel differs from other sentimental novels by focusing on a large theme like slavery and by having a man as the main character, she still set out to elicit certain strong feelings from her readers. The power in this type of writing can be seen in the reaction of contemporary readers. Georgiana May, a friend of Stowe's, wrote a letter to the author, saying: "I was up last night long after one o'clock, reading and finishing Uncle Tom's Cabin. I could not leave it any more than I could have left a dying child." Another reader is described as obsessing on the book at all hours and having considered renaming her daughter Eva. Evidently the death of Little Eva affected a lot of people at that time, because in 1852, 300 baby girls in Boston alone were given that name.

Despite this positive reaction from readers, for decades literary critics dismissed the style found in Uncle Tom's Cabin and other sentimental novels because these books were written by women and so prominently featured "women's sloppy emotions." One literary critic said that had the novel not been about slavery, "it would be just another sentimental novel," while another described the book as "primarily a derivative piece of hack work." In The Literary History of the United States, George F. Whicher called Uncle Tom's Cabin " Sunday-school fiction", full of "broadly conceived melodrama, humor, and pathos."

However, in 1985 Jane Tompkins expressed a different view of Uncle Tom's Cabin with her book In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. Tompkins praised the style so many other critics had dismissed, writing that sentimental novels showed how women's emotions had the power to change the world for the better. She also said that the popular domestic novels of the 19th century, including Uncle Tom's Cabin, were remarkable for their "intellectual complexity, ambition, and resourcefulness"; and that Uncle Tom's Cabin offers a "critique of American society far more devastating than any delivered by better-known critics such as Hawthorne and Melville."

This view remains the subject of dispute. Writing in 2001, legal scholar Richard Posner described Uncle Tom's Cabin as part of the mediocre list of canonical works that emerges when political criteria are imposed on literature.

Reactions to the novel

Uncle Tom's Cabin has exerted an influence equaled by few other novels in history. Upon publication, Uncle Tom's Cabin ignited a firestorm of protest from defenders of slavery (who created a number of books in response to the novel) while the book elicited praise from abolitionists. As a best-seller, the novel heavily influenced later protest literature.

Contemporary and world reaction

Uncle Tom's Cabin outraged people in the American South. The novel was also roundly criticized by slavery supporters.

Acclaimed Southern novelist William Gilmore Simms declared the work utterly false, while others called the novel criminal and slanderous. Reactions ranged from a bookseller in Mobile, Alabama, being forced to leave town for selling the novel to threatening letters sent to Stowe (including a package containing a slave's severed ear). Many Southern writers, like Simms, soon wrote their own books in opposition to Stowe's novel.

Some critics highlighted Stowe's paucity of life-experience relating to Southern life, saying that it led her to create inaccurate descriptions of the region. For instance, she had never been to a Southern plantation. However, Stowe always said she based the characters of her book on stories she was told by runaway slaves in Cincinnati. It is reported that "She observed firsthand several incidents which galvanized her to write [the] famous anti-slavery novel. Scenes she observed on the Ohio River, including seeing a husband and wife being sold apart, as well as newspaper and magazine accounts and interviews, contributed material to the emerging plot."

In response to these criticisms, in 1853 Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, an attempt to document the veracity of the novel's depiction of slavery. In the book, Stowe discusses each of the major characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin and cites "real life equivalents" to them while also mounting a more "aggressive attack on slavery in the South than the novel itself had." Like the novel, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin was a best-seller. However, while Stowe claimed A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin documented her previously consulted sources, she actually read many of the cited works only after the publication of her novel. A major part of the Key was Stowe's critique of how the legal system supported slavery and licensed owners' mistreatment of slaves. Thus, Stowe put more than slavery on trial; she put the law on trial. This continued an important theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin -that the shadow of law brooded over the institution of slavery and allowed owners to mistreat slaves and then avoid punishment for their mistreatment. In some cases, as Stowe pointed out, it even prevented kind owners from freeing their slaves.

Despite these criticisms, the novel still captured the imagination of many Americans. According to Stowe's son, when Abraham Lincoln met her in 1862 Lincoln commented, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." Historians are undecided if Lincoln actually said this line, and in a letter that Stowe wrote to her husband a few hours after meeting with Lincoln no mention of this comment was made. Since then, many writers have credited this novel with focusing Northern anger at the injustices of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law and helping to fuel the abolitionist movement. Union general and politician James Baird Weaver said that the book convinced him to become active in the abolitionist movement.

Uncle Tom's Cabin also created great interest in the United Kingdom. The first London edition appeared in May 1852 and sold 200,000 copies. Some of this interest was because of British antipathy to America. As one prominent writer explained, "The evil passions which Uncle Tom gratified in England were not hatred or vengeance [of slavery], but national jealousy and national vanity. We have long been smarting under the conceit of America-we are tired of hearing her boast that she is the freest and the most enlightened country that the world has ever seen. Our clergy hate her voluntary system-our Tories hate her democrats-our Whigs hate her parvenus-our Radicals hate her litigiousness, her insolence, and her ambition. All parties hailed Mrs. Stowe as a revolter from the enemy." Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to Britain during the war, argued later that " Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life among the Lowly, published in 1852, exercised, largely from fortuitous circumstances, a more immediate, considerable and dramatic world-influence than any other book ever printed."

Stowe sent a copy of the book to Charles Dickens, who wrote her in response: "I have read your book with the deepest interest and sympathy, and admire, more than I can express to you, both the generous feeling which inspired it, and the admirable power with which it is executed." The historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in his diary, in 1852: "I finished 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' a powerful and disagreeable book; too dark and Spagnoletto-like for my taste, when considered as a work of art. But on the whole, it is the most valuable addition that America has made to English literature."

A French edition, translated by M. L. Carion (or by [Anne-]Louise Swanton-Belloc?, 1796-1881), appeared by 1853 published in Cambrai and in Paris. By 1857, the novel had been translated into 20 languages, including two independent translations into Slovene just one year after its original publication, which started the since uninterrupted dialogue between American authors and Slovene translators and readers. Later, it was translated into almost every major language, including Chinese (with translator Lin Shu creating the first Chinese translation of an American novel in 1901) and Amharic (with the 1930 translation created in support of Ethiopian efforts to end the suffering of blacks in that nation). The book was so widely read that Sigmund Freud reported a number of patients with sado-masochistic tendencies who he believed had been influenced by reading about the whipping of slaves in Uncle Tom's Cabin. A short article which was published in the official newspaper of the Salvadoran government on July 22, 1853 praised Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book's success. Influenced by the literature of protest, Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, current leader of Islamic Republic of Iran, addressing a number of Iranian intellectuals, remembered the novel as one of the most tragic works in the modern world depicting a morbid history of slavery in America.

Literary significance and criticism

As the first widely read political novel in the United States, Uncle Tom's Cabin greatly influenced development of not only American literature but also protest literature in general. Later books which owe a large debt to Uncle Tom's Cabin include by Upton Sinclair and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Despite this undisputed significance, Uncle Tom's Cabin has been called "a blend of children's fable and propaganda." The novel has also been dismissed by a number of literary critics as "merely a sentimental novel," while critic George Whicher stated in his Literary History of the United States that "Nothing attributable to Mrs. Stowe or her handiwork can account for the novel's enormous vogue; its author's resources as a purveyor of Sunday-school fiction were not remarkable. She had at most a ready command of broadly conceived melodrama, humor, and pathos, and of these popular sentiments she compounded her book." Other critics, though, have praised the novel. Edmund Wilson stated that "To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom's Cabin may therefore prove a startling experience. It is a much more impressive work than one has ever been allowed to suspect." Jane Tompkins states that the novel is one of the classics of American literature and wonders if many literary critics dismiss the book because it was simply too popular during its day.

Over the years scholars have postulated a number of theories about what Stowe was trying to say with the novel (aside from the obvious themes, such as condemning slavery). For example, as an ardent Christian and active abolitionist, Stowe placed many of her religious beliefs into the novel. Some scholars have stated that Stowe saw her novel as offering a solution to the moral and political dilemma that troubled many slavery opponents: whether engaging in prohibited behavior was justified in opposing evil. Was the use of violence to oppose the violence of slavery and the breaking of proslavery laws morally defensible? Which of Stowe's characters should be emulated, the passive Uncle Tom or the defiant George Harris? Stowe's solution was similar to Ralph Waldo Emerson's: God's will would be followed if each person sincerely examined his principles and acted on them.

Scholars have also seen the novel as expressing the values and ideas of the Free Will Movement. In this view, the character of George Harris embodies the principles of free labor, while the complex character of Ophelia represents those Northerners who condoned compromise with slavery. In contrast to Ophelia is Dinah, who operates on passion. During the course of the novel Ophelia is transformed, just as the Republican Party (three years later) proclaimed that the North must transform itself and stand up for its antislavery principles.

Feminist theory can also be seen at play in Stowe's book, with the novel as a critique of the patriarchal nature of slavery. For Stowe, blood relations rather than paternalistic relations between masters and slaves formed the basis of families. Moreover, Stowe viewed national solidarity as an extension of a person's family, thus feelings of nationality stemmed from possessing a shared race. Consequently, she advocated African colonization for freed slaves and not amalgamation into American society.

The book has also been seen as an attempt to redefine masculinity as a necessary step toward the abolition of slavery. In this view, abolitionists had begun to resist the vision of aggressive and dominant men that the conquest and colonization of the early 19th century had fostered. In order to change the notion of manhood so that men could oppose slavery without jeopardizing their self-image or their standing in society, some abolitionists drew on principles of women's suffrage and Christianity as well as passivism, and praised men for cooperation, compassion, and civic spirit. Others within the abolitionist movement argued for conventional, aggressive masculine action. All the men in Stowe's novel are representations of either one kind of man or the other.

George Orwell is his essay " Good Bad Books", first published in on 2 November 1945, claims that "perhaps the supreme example of the 'good bad' book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other." But he concludes "I would back Uncle Tom's Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies."

James Baldwin described Uncle Tom's Cabin as, "a bad novel, having, in its self-righteousness, virtuous sentimentality". He argued that the novel lacked psychological depth, and that Stowe, "was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer".

Creation and popularization of stereotypes

Some modern scholars and readers have criticized the book for condescending racist descriptions of the black characters' appearances, speech, and behavior, as well as the passive nature of Uncle Tom in accepting his fate. The novel's creation and use of common stereotypes about African Americans is significant because Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel in the world during the 19th century. As a result, the book (along with illustrations from the book and associated stage productions) was accused of playing a major role in permanently ingraining such stereotypes into the American psyche. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Power and Black Arts Movements attacked the novel, claiming that the character of Uncle Tom engaged in "race betrayal", and that Tom made slaves out to be worse than slave owners.

Among the stereotypes of blacks in Uncle Tom's Cabin are the "happy darky" (in the lazy, carefree character of Sam); the light-skinned tragic mulatto as a sex object (in the characters of Eliza, Cassy, and Emmeline); the affectionate, dark-skinned female mammy (through several characters, including Mammy, a cook at the St. Clare plantation); the pickaninny stereotype of black children (in the character of Topsy); the Uncle Tom, an African American who is too eager to please white people. Stowe intended Tom to be a "noble hero" and a Christ-like figure who, like Jesus at his crucifixion, forgives the people responsible for his death. The false stereotype of Tom as a "subservient fool who bows down to the white man", and the resulting derogatory term "Uncle Tom", resulted from staged " Tom Shows", which sometimes replaced Tom's grim death with an upbeat ending where Tom causes his oppressors to see the error of their ways, and they all reconcile happily. Stowe had no control over these shows and their alteration of her story.

These negative associations have to some extent obscured the historical impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "vital antislavery tool". James Baldwin, in a 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel", called Uncle Tom's Cabin a "very bad novel" ... "ruined by its "self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality", and stated that Stowe was less a novelist than an "impassioned pamphleteer", i.e., a propagandist for the antislavery cause. Edward Rothstein has claimed that Baldwin missed the point and that the purpose of the novel was "to treat slavery not as a political issue but as an individually human one - and ultimately a challenge to Christianity itself"; as a propaganda work it need not necessarily be great literature in order to succeed in its goals.

In recent years, however, scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. have re-examined Uncle Tom's Cabin, stating that the book is a "central document in American race relations and a significant moral and political exploration of the character of those relations".

Anti-Tom literature

In response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, writers in the Southern United States produced a number of books to rebut Stowe's novel. This so-called Anti-Tom literature generally took a pro-slavery viewpoint, arguing that the issues of slavery as depicted in Stowe's book were overblown and incorrect. The novels in this genre tended to feature a benign white patriarchal master and a pure wife, both of whom presided over childlike slaves in a benevolent extended family style plantation. The novels either implied or directly stated that African Americans were a childlike people unable to live their lives without being directly overseen by white people.

Among the most famous anti-Tom books are The Sword and the Distaff by William Gilmore Simms, Aunt Phillis's Cabin by Mary Henderson Eastman, and The Planter's Northern Bride by Caroline Lee Hentz, with the last author having been a close personal friend of Stowe's when the two lived in Cincinnati. Simms' book was published a few months after Stowe's novel, and it contains a number of sections and discussions disputing Stowe's book and her view of slavery. Hentz's 1854 novel, widely read at the time but now largely forgotten, offers a defense of slavery as seen through the eyes of a Northern woman-the daughter of an abolitionist, no less-who marries a Southern slave owner.

In the decade between the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the start of the American Civil War, between twenty and thirty anti-Tom books were published. Among these novels are two books titled Uncle Tom's Cabin as It Is (one by W. L. Smith and the other by C. H. Wiley) and a book by John Pendleton Kennedy. More than half of these anti-Tom books were written by white women, with Simms commenting at one point about the "Seemingly poetic justice of having the Northern woman (Stowe) answered by a Southern woman."

"Professional racist" Thomas Dixon Jr. saw a dramatic version of the novel and, feeling that it was unfair to the South, wrote The Leopard's Spots (1902) as a reply. He uses characters from Stowe's work: Simon Legree, George Harris, Tim (for Arthur) and George Shelby, and Tom, converted into Tom Camp, a white former Confederate soldier. Dixon is a key figure in popularizing the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

Dramatic adaptations

Plays and Tom shows

Even though Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, far more Americans of that time saw the story as a stage play or musical than read the book. Eric Lott, in his book Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production, estimates that at least three million people saw these plays, ten times the book's first-year sales.

Given the lax copyright laws of the time, stage plays based on Uncle Tom's Cabin-"Tom shows"-began to appear while the novel was still being serialized. Stowe refused to authorize dramatization of her work because of her distrust of drama (although she did eventually go to see George L. Aiken's version and, according to Francis Underwood, was "delighted" by Caroline Howard's portrayal of Topsy). Aiken's stage production was the most popular play in the U.S. and England for 75 years. Stowe's refusal to authorize a particular dramatic version left the field clear for any number of adaptations, some launched for (various) political reasons and others as simply commercial theatrical ventures.

No international copyright laws existed at the time. The book and plays were translated into several languages; Stowe received no money, which could have meant as much as "three-fourths of her just and legitimate wages."

All of the Tom shows appear to have incorporated elements of melodrama and blackface minstrelsy. These plays varied tremendously in their politics-some faithfully reflected Stowe's sentimentalized antislavery politics, while others were more moderate, or even pro-slavery. Many of the productions featured demeaning racial caricatures of Black people, while a number of productions also featured songs by Stephen Foster (including " My Old Kentucky Home", " Old Folks at Home", and "Massa's in the Cold Ground"). The best-known Tom Shows were those of George Aiken and H.J. Conway.

The version by Aiken is perhaps the best known stage adaptation, released just a few months after the novel was published. This six-act behemoth also set an important precedent by being the first show on Broadway to stand on its own, without the performance of other entertainments or any afterpiece. Most of Aiken's dialogue was taken verbatim from Stowe's novel, and his adaptation included four full musical numbers written by the producer, George C. Howard. Another legacy of Aiken's version is its reliance upon very different locations all portrayed on the same stage. This reliance led to large sets and set a precedent for the future days of film. By focusing on the stark and desperate situations of his characters, Aiken appealed to the emotions of his audiences. By combining this melodramatic approach with the content of Stowe's novel, Aiken helped to create a powerful visual indictment against the institution of slavery.

The many stage variants of Uncle Tom's Cabin "dominated northern popular culture... for several years" during the 19th century, and the plays were still being performed in the early 20th century.

One of the unique and controversial variants of the Tom Shows was Walt Disney's Mickey's Mellerdrammer, a United Artists film released in 1933. The title is a corruption of "melodrama", thought to harken back to the earliest minstrel shows, as a film short based on a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin by the Disney characters. In that film, Mickey Mouse and friends stage their own production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Mickey Mouse was already black-colored, but the advertising poster for the film shows Mickey dressed in blackface with exaggerated, orange lips; bushy, white sidewhiskers made out of cotton; and his trademark white gloves.

Uncle Tom's Cabin has been adapted several times as a film. Most of these movies were created during the silent film era ( Uncle Tom's Cabin was the most-filmed book of that time period). Because of the continuing popularity of both the book and "Tom" shows, audiences were already familiar with the characters and the plot, making it easier for the film to be understood without spoken words. There has been no Hollywood treatment since the end of the silent era.

The first film version of Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the earliest full-length movies (although full-length at that time meant between 10 and 14 minutes). This 1903 film, directed by Edwin S. Porter, used white actors in blackface in the major roles and black performers only as extras. This version was evidently similar to many of the "Tom Shows" of earlier decades and featured numerous stereotypes about blacks (such as having the slaves dance in almost any context, including at a slave auction).

In 1910, a three-reel Vitagraph Company of America production was directed by J. Stuart Blackton and adapted by Eugene Mullin. According to The Dramatic Mirror, this film was "a decided innovation" in motion pictures and "the first time an American company" released a dramatic film in three reels. Until then, full-length movies of the time were 15 minutes long and contained only one reel of film. The movie starred Florence Turner, Mary Fuller, Edwin R. Phillips, Flora Finch, Genevieve Tobin and Carlyle Blackwell, Sr.

At least four more movie adaptations were created in the next two decades. The last silent film version was released in 1927. Directed by Harry A. Pollard (who played Uncle Tom in a 1913 release of Uncle Tom's Cabin), this two-hour movie was more than a year in production and was the third most expensive picture of the silent era (at a cost of $1.8 million). The black actor Charles Gilpin was originally cast in the title role, but he was fired after the studio decided his "portrayal was too aggressive." James B. Lowe took over the character of Tom. The screenplay takes many liberties with the original book, including altering the Eliza and George subplot, introducing the Civil War and Emancipation, and combining the characters of Eliza and Emmeline. Another difference occurs after Tom dies: Simon Legree is haunted by an apparitional vision of the late Tom and falls to his death in a futile effort to attack the ghostly image.

Black media outlets of the time praised the film, but the studio-fearful of a backlash from Southern and white film audiences-ended up cutting out controversial scenes, including the film's opening sequence at a slave auction (in which a mother is torn away from her baby). The story was adapted by Harvey F. Pollard, Thew and A. P. Younger, with titles by Walter Anthony. It starred James B. Lowe, Virginia Grey, George Siegmann, Margarita Fischer, Mona Ray and Madame Sul-Te-Wan.

For several decades after the end of the silent film era, the subject matter of Stowe's novel was judged too sensitive for further film interpretation. In 1946, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer considered filming the story but ceased production after protests led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

A German-language version, Onkel Toms Hütte, directed by Géza von Radványi, was released in 1965 and was presented in the United States by exploitation film presenter Kroger Babb.

The most recent film version was a television broadcast in 1987, directed by Stan Lathan and adapted by John Gay. It starred Avery Brooks, Phylicia Rashad, Edward Woodward, Jenny Lewis, Samuel L. Jackson and Endyia Kinney.

In addition to film adaptations, versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin have been produced in other formats. In Brazil, the adapted version A Cabana do Pai Tomás was produced as a TV soap opera by Rede Globo; with 205 episodes, it was aired from July 1969 to March 1970.

Versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin were featured in a number of animated cartoons, including Walt Disney's " Mickey's Mellerdrammer" (1933), which features Mickey Mouse performing the play in blackface with large orange lips; " Uncle Tom's Bungalow" (1937), a Warner Brother's cartoon supervised by Tex Avery; "Eliza on Ice" (1944), one of the earliest Mighty Mouse cartoons produced by Paul Terry; "Uncle Tom's Cabana" (1947), a six-minute cartoon directed by Tex Avery, and the Bugs Bunny cartoon " Southern Fried Rabbit" (1953), wherein Bugs disguises himself as Uncle Tom and sings " My Old Kentucky Home" in order to cross the Mason-Dixon line.

Uncle Tom's Cabin has influenced numerous movies, including The Birth of a Nation. This controversial 1915 film set the dramatic climax in a slave cabin similar to that of Uncle Tom, where several white Southerners unite with their former enemy (Yankee soldiers) to defend, according to the film's caption, their " Aryan birthright." According to scholars, this reuse of such a familiar image of a slave cabin would have resonated with, and been understood by, audiences of the time.

Other movies influenced by or making use of Uncle Tom's Cabin include , a 1936 Shirley Temple film; Uncle Tom's Uncle, a 1926 film; its 1932 remake ; the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, in which a ballet called "Small House of Uncle Thomas" is performed in traditional Siamese style; and Gangs of New York, in which Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis's characters attend an imagined wartime adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Collections

Major collections of Uncle Tom's Cabin books, ephemera, and artifacts reside at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

References

Aiken, George L. Uncle Tom's Cabin. New York: Garland, 1993.

Gates, Henry Louis; and Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Africana: Arts and Letters: an A-to-Z reference of writers, musicians, and artists of the African American Experience, Running Press, 2005.

Gates, Henry Louis; and Hollis Robbins. The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-05946-4

Gerould, Daniel C., ed. American Melodrama. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983.

Jordan-Lake, Joy. Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe, Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Lowance, Mason I. (Jr.); Westbrook, Ellen E.; De Prospo, R., The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom's Cabin, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Parfait, Claire. The Publishing History of Uncle's Tom's Cabin, 1852-2002, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

Reynolds, David S. Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America, Norton, 2011. 351 pp.

Rosenthal, Debra J. Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Routledge, 2003.

Sundquist, Eric J., ed. New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Tompkins, Jane. In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Weinstein, Cindy. The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson, Princeton University Press, 2001.

External links

Uncle Tom's Cabin on In Our Time at the BBC

University of Virginia Web site "Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive" - edited by Stephen Railton, covers 1830 to 1930, offering links to primary and bibliographic sources on the cultural background, various editions, and public reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential novel. The site also provides the full text of the book, audio and video clips, and examples of related merchandising.

Uncle Tom's Cabin: or Life among the lowly; frontispiece by John Gilbert; ornamental title-page by Phiz; and 130 engravings on wood by Matthew Urlwin Sears, 1853 (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)

Pictures and stories from Uncle Tom's Cabin; "The purpose of the editor of this little work, has been to adapt it for the juvenile family circle. The verses have accordingly been written by the authoress for the capacity of the youngest readers ..." 1853 (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)

Uncle Tom's Cabin at Project Gutenberg

Uncle Tom's Cabin, available at Internet Archive. Scanned, illustrated original editions.

Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site

Uncle Tom's Cabin public domain audiobook at LibriVox

More on the lack of international copyright

Uncle Tom's Cabin for Children From the Collections at the Library of Congress

Guide to the Uncle Tom's Cabin Collection 1852-1956 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center

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Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War".

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A period of repeated outbreaks of violent guerrilla warfare between anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces, known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

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Bleeding Kansas - Summary, Causes & John Brown’s Role | HISTORY

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Bleeding Kansas describes the period of repeated outbreaks of violent guerrilla warfare between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces following the creation of the new territory of Kansas in 1854.

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Dred Scott, an enslaved Black man, lost his fight for freedom in the court case known as Dred Scott v. Sandford.

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Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and thus they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. The decision is widely considered the worst ever rendered in the Supreme Court's history, being widely denounced for its overt racism, perceived judicial activism and poor legal reasoning, and for its crucial role in the start of the American Civil War four years later. Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions". Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it the Court's "greatest self-inflicted wound".

The decision involved the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved black man whose owners had taken him from Missouri, a slave-holding state, into Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal. When his owners later brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom and claimed that because he had been taken into " free" U.S. territory, he had automatically been freed and was legally no longer a slave. Scott sued first in Missouri state court, which ruled that he was still a slave under its law. He then sued in U.S. federal court, which ruled against him by deciding that it had to apply Missouri law to the case. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In March 1857, the Supreme Court issued a 7-2 decision against Scott. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Court ruled that people of African descent "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States". Taney supported his ruling with an extended survey of American state and local laws from the time of the Constitution's drafting in 1787 that purported to show that a "perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery". Because the Court ruled that Scott was not an American citizen, he was also not a citizen of any state and, accordingly, could never establish the " diversity of citizenship" that Article III of the U.S. Constitution requires for a U.S. federal court to be able to exercise jurisdiction over a case. After ruling on those issues surrounding Scott, Taney struck down the Missouri Compromise as a limitation on slave owners' property rights that exceeded the U.S. Congress's constitutional powers.

Although Taney and several other justices hoped the decision would settle the slavery controversy, which was increasingly dividing the American public, the decision only exacerbated interstate tension. Taney's majority opinion suited the slaveholding states, but was intensely decried in all the other states. The decision inflamed the national debate over slavery and deepened the divide that led ultimately to the American Civil War. In 1865, after the Union's victory, the Court's ruling in Dred Scott was superseded by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, whose first section guaranteed citizenship for "[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof".

Historians agree that the Court decision was a major disaster for the nation as it dramatically inflamed tensions leading to the Civil War. In 2022 historian David W. Blight argues that 1857 was, "the great pivot on the road to disunion...largely because of the Dred Scott case, which stoked the fear, distrust and conspiratorial hatred already common in both the North and the South to new levels of intensity." The ruling is widely considered a blatant act of judicial activism with the intent of bringing finality to the territorial crisis resulting from the Louisiana Purchase by creating a constitutional right to own slaves anywhere in the country while permanently disenfranchising all people of African descent. The court's decision to overturn the Missouri Compromise, which had already been replaced with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and thus was a legally moot issue, is cited as proof of this because the latter act was determined by the due process of popular sovereignty, and thus could not be overturned the same way the court did the Missouri compromise. During the United States election of 1860, abolitionists formed the Republican Party that rejected the ruling as being corrupted by partisanship and non-binding because the court had no jurisdiction. Their Presidential nominee, Abraham Lincoln, stated he would not permit slavery anywhere in the country except where it already existed, which directly contradicted the court's ruling. His election is considered the final event that led the Southern states to secede from the Union, igniting the American Civil War.

In the late 1810s, a major political dispute arose over the creation of new American states from the vast territory the United States had acquired from France in 1803 through the Louisiana Purchase. The dispute centered on whether the new states would be "free" states, like the Northern states, in which slavery would be illegal, or whether they would be "slave" states, like the Southern states, in which slavery would be legal. The Southern states wanted the new states to be slave states in order to enhance their own political and economic power. The Northern states wanted the new states to be free states for their own political and economic reasons, as well as their moral concerns over allowing the institution of slavery to expand.

In 1820, the U.S. Congress passed legislation known as the " Missouri Compromise" that was intended to resolve the dispute. The Compromise first admitted Maine into the Union as a free state, then created Missouri out of a portion of the Louisiana Purchase territory and admitted it as a slave state; at the same time it prohibited slavery in the area north of the Parallel 36°30′ north, where most of the territory lay. The legal effects of a slaveowner taking his slaves from Missouri into the free territory north of the 36°30′ north parallel, as well as the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise itself, eventually came to a head in the Dred Scott case.

Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia around 1799. Little is known of his early years. His owner, Peter Blow, moved to Alabama in 1818, taking his six slaves along to work a farm near Huntsville. In 1830, Blow gave up farming and settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he sold Scott to U.S. Army surgeon Dr. John Emerson. After purchasing Scott, Emerson took him to Fort Armstrong in Illinois. A free state, Illinois had been free as a territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and had prohibited slavery in its constitution in 1819 when it was admitted as a state.

In 1836, Emerson moved with Scott from Illinois to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin territory in what has become the state of Minnesota. Slavery in the Wisconsin Territory (some of which, including Fort Snelling, was part of the Louisiana Purchase) was prohibited by the U.S. Congress under the Missouri Compromise. During his stay at Fort Snelling, Scott married Harriet Robinson in a civil ceremony by Harriet's owner, Major Lawrence Taliaferro, a justice of the peace who was also an Indian agent. The ceremony would have been unnecessary had Dred Scott been a slave, as slave marriages had no recognition in the law.

In 1837, the army ordered Emerson to Jefferson Barracks Military Post, south of St. Louis. Emerson left Scott and his wife at Fort Snelling, where he leased their services out for profit. By hiring Scott out in a free state, Emerson was effectively bringing the institution of slavery into a free state, which was a direct violation of the Missouri Compromise, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Wisconsin Enabling Act.

Before the end of the year, the army reassigned Emerson to Fort Jesup in Louisiana, where Emerson married Eliza Irene Sanford in February 1838. Emerson sent for Scott and Harriet, who proceeded to Louisiana to serve their master and his wife. Within months, Emerson was transferred back to Fort Snelling. While en route to Fort Snelling, Scott's daughter Eliza was born on a steamboat under way on the Mississippi River between Illinois and what would become Iowa. Because Eliza was born in free territory, she was technically born as a free person under both federal and state laws. Upon entering Louisiana, the Scotts could have sued for their freedom, but did not. One scholar suggests that, in all likelihood, the Scotts would have been granted their freedom by a Louisiana court, as it had respected laws of free states that slaveholders forfeited their right to slaves if they brought them in for extended periods. This had been the holding in Louisiana state courts for more than 20 years.

Toward the end of 1838, the army reassigned Emerson back to Fort Snelling. By 1840, Emerson's wife Irene returned to St. Louis with their slaves, while Dr. Emerson served in the Seminole War. While in St. Louis, she hired them out. In 1842, Emerson left the army. After he died in the Iowa Territory in 1843, his widow Irene inherited his estate, including the Scotts. For three years after John Emerson's death, she continued to lease out the Scotts as hired slaves. In 1846, Scott attempted to purchase his and his family's freedom, but Irene Emerson refused, prompting Scott to resort to legal recourse.

Having been unsuccessful in his attempt to purchase his freedom, Dred Scott, with the help of his legal advisers, sued Emerson for his freedom in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County on April 6, 1846. A separate petition was filed for his wife Harriet, making them the first married couple to file freedom suits in tandem in its 50-year history. They received financial assistance from the family of Dred's previous owner, Peter Blow. Blow's daughter Charlotte was married to Joseph Charless, an officer at the Bank of Missouri. Charless signed legal documents as security for the Scotts and later secured the services of the bank's attorney, Samuel Mansfield Bay, for the trial.

It was expected that the Scotts would win their freedom with relative ease. By 1846, dozens of freedom suits had been won in Missouri by former slaves. Most had claimed their legal right to freedom on the basis that they, or their mothers, had previously lived in free states or territories. Among the most important legal precedents were Winny v. Whitesides and Rachel v. Walker. In Winny v. Whitesides, the Missouri Supreme Court had ruled in 1824 that a person who had been held as a slave in Illinois, where slavery was illegal, and then brought to Missouri, was free by virtue of residence in a free state. In Rachel v. Walker, the state supreme court had ruled that a U.S. Army officer who took a slave to a military post in a territory where slavery was prohibited and retained her there for several years, had thereby "forfeit[ed] his property". Rachel, like Dred Scott, had accompanied her enslaver to Fort Snelling.

Scott was represented by three different lawyers from the filing of the original petition to the time of the actual trial, over one year later. The first was Francis B. Murdoch, a prolific freedom suit attorney who abruptly left St. Louis. Murdoch was replaced by Charles D. Drake, an in-law of the Blow family. When Drake also left the state, Samuel M. Bay took over as the Scotts' lawyer. Irene Emerson was represented by George W. Goode, a proslavery lawyer from Virginia. By the time the case went to trial, it had been reassigned from Judge John M. Krum, who was proslavery, to Judge Alexander Hamilton, who was known to be sympathetic to freedom suits.

Dred Scott v. Irene Emerson finally went to trial for the first time on June 30, 1847. Henry Peter Blow testified in court that his father had owned Dred and sold him to John Emerson. The fact that Scott had been taken to live on free soil was clearly established through depositions from witnesses who had known Scott and Dr. Emerson at Fort Armstrong and Fort Snelling. Grocer Samuel Russell testified that he had hired the Scotts from Irene Emerson and paid her father, Alexander Sanford, for their services. Upon cross examination, however, Russell admitted that the leasing arrangements had actually been made by his wife, Adeline.

Thus, Russell's testimony was ruled hearsay, and the jury returned a verdict for Emerson. This created a seemingly contradictory outcome in which Scott was ordered by the court to remain Irene Emerson's slave, because he had been unable to prove that he was previously Irene Emerson's slave.

Bay moved immediately for a new trial on the basis that Scott's case had been lost due to a technicality which could be rectified, rather than the facts. Judge Hamilton finally issued the order for a new trial on December 2, 1847. Two days later, Emerson's lawyer objected to a new trial by filing a bill of exceptions. The case was then taken on writ of error to the Supreme Court of Missouri. Scott's new lawyers, Alexander P. Field and David N. Hall, argued that the writ of error was inappropriate because the lower court had not yet issued a final judgment. The state supreme court agreed unanimously with their position and dismissed Emerson's appeal on June 30, 1848. The main issue before the court at this stage was procedural and no substantive issues were discussed.

Before the state supreme court had convened, Goode had presented a motion on behalf of Emerson to have Scott taken into custody and hired out. On March 17, 1848, Judge Hamilton issued the order to the St. Louis County sheriff. Anyone hiring Scott had to post a bond of six-hundred dollars. Wages he earned during that time were placed in escrow, to be paid to the party that prevailed in the lawsuit. Scott would remain in the sheriff's custody or hired out by him until March 18, 1857. One of Scott's lawyers, David N. Hall, hired him starting March 17, 1849.

The St. Louis Fire of 1849, a cholera epidemic, and two continuances delayed the retrial in the St. Louis Circuit Court until January 12, 1850. Irene Emerson was now defended by Hugh A. Garland and Lyman D. Norris, while Scott was represented by Field and Hall. Judge Alexander Hamilton was presiding. The proceedings were similar to the first trial. The same depositions from Catherine A. Anderson and Miles H. Clark were used to establish that Dr. Emerson had taken Scott to free territory.

This time, the hearsay problem was surmounted by a deposition from Adeline Russell stating that she had hired the Scotts from Irene Emerson, thereby proving that Emerson claimed them as her slaves. Samuel Russell testified in court once again that he had paid for their services. The defense then changed strategy and argued in their summation that Mrs. Emerson had every right to hire out Dred Scott, because he had lived with Dr. Emerson at Fort Armstrong and Fort Snelling under military jurisdiction, not under civil law. In doing so, the defense ignored the precedent set by Rachel v. Walker. In his rebuttal, Hall stated that the fact that they were military posts did not matter, and pointed out that Dr. Emerson had left Scott behind at Fort Snelling, hired out to others, after being reassigned to a new post.

The jury quickly returned a verdict in favor of Dred Scott, nominally making him a free man. Judge Hamilton declared Harriet, Eliza and Lizzie Scott to be free as well. Garland moved immediately for a new trial, and was overruled. On February 13, 1850, Emerson's defense filed a bill of exceptions, which was certified by Judge Hamilton, setting into motion another appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court. Counsel for the opposing sides signed an agreement that moving forward, only Dred Scott v. Irene Emerson would be advanced, and that any decision made by the high court would apply to Harriet's suit, also. In 1849 or 1850, Irene Emerson left St. Louis and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. Her brother, John F. A. Sanford, continued looking after her business interests when she left, and her departure had no impact on the case.

Both parties filed briefs with the Supreme Court of Missouri on March 8, 1850. A busy docket delayed consideration of the case until the October term. By then, the issue of slavery had become politically charged, even within the judiciary. Although the Missouri Supreme Court had not yet overturned precedent in freedom suits, in the 1840s, the court's proslavery justices had explicitly stated their opposition to freeing slaves. After the court convened on October 25, 1850, the two justices who were proslavery anti-Benton Democrats - William Barclay Napton and James Harvey Birch - persuaded John Ferguson Ryland, a Benton Democrat, to join them in a unanimous decision that Dred Scott remained a slave under Missouri law. However, Judge Napton delayed writing the court's opinion for months. Then in August 1851, both Napton and Birch lost their seats in the Missouri Supreme Court, following the state's first supreme court election, with only Ryland remaining as an incumbent. The case thus needed to be considered again by the newly elected court. The reorganized Missouri Supreme Court now included two "moderates" - Hamilton Gamble and John Ryland - and one staunch proslavery justice, William Scott.

David N. Hall had prepared the brief for Dred Scott, but died in March 1851. Alexander P. Field continued alone as counsel for Dred Scott, and resubmitted the same briefs from 1850 for both sides. On November 29, 1851, the case was taken under consideration, on written briefs alone, and a decision was reached. However, before Judge Scott could write the court's opinion, Lyman Norris, co-counsel for Irene Emerson, obtained permission to submit a new brief he had been preparing, to replace the original one submitted by Garland.

Norris's brief has been characterized as "a sweeping denunciation of the authority of both the [Northwest] Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise." Although he stopped short of questioning their constitutionality, Norris questioned their applicability and criticized the early Missouri Supreme Court, ridiculing former Justice George Tompkins as "the great apostle of freedom at that day." Reviewing the court's past decisions on freedom suits, Norris acknowledged that if Rachel v. Walker was allowed to stand, his client would lose. Norris then challenged the concept of "once free, always free", and asserted that the court under Tompkins had been wrong to rule that the Ordinance of 1787 remained in force after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. Finally, he argued that the Missouri Compromise should be disregarded whenever it interfered with Missouri law, and that the laws of other states should not be enforced, if their enforcement would cause Missouri citizens to lose their property. In support of his argument, he cited Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Strader v. Graham, which argued that the status of a slave returning from a free state must be determined by the slave state itself. According to historian Walter Ehrlich, the closing of Norris's brief was "a racist harangue that not only revealed the prejudices of its author, but also indicated how the Dred Scott case had become a vehicle for the expression of such views". Noting that Norris's proslavery "doctrines" were later incorporated into the court's final decision, Ehrlich writes (emphasis his):

From this point on, the Dred Scott case clearly changed from a genuine freedom suit to the controversial political issue for which it became infamous in American history.

On March 22, 1852, Judge William Scott announced the decision of the Missouri Supreme Court that Dred Scott remained a slave, and ordered the trial court's judgment to be reversed. Judge Ryland concurred, while Chief Justice Hamilton Gamble dissented. The majority opinion written by Judge Scott focused on the issue of comity or conflict of laws, and relied on " states' rights" rhetoric:

Every State has the right of determining how far, in a spirit of comity, it will respect the laws of other States. Those laws have no intrinsic right to be enforced beyond the limits of the State for which they were enacted. The respect allowed them will depend altogether on their conformity to the policy of our institutions. No State is bound to carry into effect enactments conceived in a spirit hostile to that which pervades her own laws.

Judge Scott did not deny the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, and acknowledged that its prohibition of slavery was "absolute", but only within the specified territory. Thus, a slave crossing the border could obtain his freedom, but only within the court of the free state. Rejecting the court's own precedent, Scott argued that "'Once free' did not necessarily mean 'always free.'" He cited the Kentucky Court of Appeals decision in Graham v. Strader, which had held that a Kentucky slaveowner who permitted a slave to go to Ohio temporarily, did not forfeit ownership of the slave. To justify overturning three decades of precedent, Judge Scott argued that circumstances had changed:

Times now are not 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 consequence 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.

On March 23, 1852, the day after the Missouri Supreme Court decision had been announced, Irene Emerson's lawyers filed an order in the St. Louis Circuit Court for the bonds signed by the Blow family to cover the Scotts' court costs; return of the slaves themselves; and transfer of their wages earned over four years, plus 6 percent interest. On June 29, 1852, Judge Hamilton overruled the order.

The case looked hopeless, and the Blow family could no longer pay for Scott's legal costs. Scott also lost both of his lawyers when Alexander Field moved to Louisiana and David Hall died. The case was undertaken by Roswell Field, who employed Scott as a janitor. Field also discussed the case with LaBeaume, who had taken over the lease on the Scotts in 1851. After the Missouri Supreme Court decision, Judge Hamilton turned down a request by Emerson's lawyers to release the rent payments from escrow and to deliver the slaves into their owner's custody.

In 1853, Dred Scott again sued his current owner John Sanford, but this time in federal court. Sanford returned to New York and the federal courts had diversity jurisdiction under Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. In addition to the existing complaints, Scott alleged that Sanford had assaulted his family and held them captive for six hours on January 1, 1853.

At trial in 1854, Judge Robert William Wells directed the jury to rely on Missouri law on the question of Scott's freedom. Since the Missouri Supreme Court had held that Scott remained a slave, the jury found in favor of Sanford. Scott then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the clerk misspelled the defendant's name, and the case was recorded as Dred Scott v. Sandford, with an ever-erroneous title. Scott was represented before the Supreme Court by Montgomery Blair and George Ticknor Curtis, whose brother Benjamin was a Supreme Court Justice. Sanford was represented by Reverdy Johnson and Henry S. Geyer.

When the case was filed, the two sides agreed on a statement of facts that claimed Scott had been sold by Dr. Emerson to John Sanford, though this was a legal fiction. Dr. Emerson had died in 1843, and Dred Scott had filed his 1847 suit against Irene Emerson. There is no record of Dred Scott's transfer to Sanford or of his transfer back to Irene. John Sanford died shortly before Scott's manumission, and Scott was not listed in the probate records of Sanford's estate. Also, Sanford was not acting as Dr. Emerson's executor, as he was never appointed by a probate court, and the Emerson estate had been settled when the federal case was filed.

The murky circumstances of ownership led many to conclude the parties to Dred Scott v. Sandford contrived to create a test case. Mrs. Emerson's remarriage to abolitionist U.S. Representative Calvin C. Chaffee seemed suspicious to contemporaries, and Sanford was thought to be a front and to have allowed himself to be sued, despite not actually being Scott's owner. Nevertheless, Sanford had been involved in the case since 1847, before his sister married Chaffee. He had secured counsel for his sister in the state case, and he engaged the same lawyer for his own defense in the federal case. Sanford also consented to be represented by genuine pro-slavery advocates before the Supreme Court, rather than to put up a token defense.

Historians discovered that after the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case but before it issued a ruling, President-elect James Buchanan wrote to his friend, Supreme Court Associate Justice John Catron, to ask whether the case would be decided by the Court before his inauguration in March 1857. Buchanan hoped that the decision would quell unrest in the country over the slavery issue by issuing a ruling to take it out of political debate. He later successfully pressured Associate Justice Robert Cooper Grier, a Northerner, to join the Southern majority in Dred Scott to prevent the appearance that the decision was made along sectional lines. According to historian Paul Finkelman:

Buchanan already knew what the Court was going to decide. In a major breach of Court etiquette, Justice Grier, who, like Buchanan, was from Pennsylvania, had kept the President-elect fully informed about the progress of the case and the internal debates within the Court. When Buchanan urged the nation to support the decision, he already knew what Taney would say. Republican suspicions of impropriety turned out to be fully justified.

Biographer Jean H. Baker argues that Buchanan's use of political pressure on a member of a sitting court was regarded then, as now, to be highly improper. Republicans fueled speculation as to Buchanan's influence by publicizing that Taney had secretly informed Buchanan of the decision. Buchanan declared in his inaugural address that the slavery question would "be speedily and finally settled" by the Supreme Court.

On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott in a 7-2 decision that fills over 200 pages in the United States Reports. The decision contains opinions from all nine justices, but the "majority opinion" has always been the focus of the controversy.

Seven justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney began the Court's opinion with what he saw as the core issue in the case: whether or not black people could possess federal citizenship under the U.S. Constitution.

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 of the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied [sic] by that instrument to the citizen?

In answer, the Court ruled that they could not. It held that black people could not be American citizens, and therefore a lawsuit to which they were a party could never qualify for the " diversity of citizenship" that Article III of the Constitution requires for American federal courts to have jurisdiction over cases that do not involve federal questions.

The primary rationale for the Court's ruling was Taney's assertion that black African slaves and their descendants were never intended to be part of the American social and political landscape.

We think ... that they [black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America's founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.

Taney then extensively reviewed laws from the original American states that involved the status of black Americans at the time of the Constitution's drafting in 1787. He concluded that these laws showed that a "perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery". Thus, he concluded, black people were not American citizens, and could not sue as citizens in federal courts. This meant that U.S. states lacked the power to alter the legal status of black people by granting them state citizenship.

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. ... They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order ... 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.

This holding normally would have ended the decision, since it disposed of Dred Scott's case, but Taney did not conclude the matter before the Court in the normal manner. He went on to assess the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise itself, writing that the Compromise's legal provisions intended to free slaves who were living north of the 36°N latitude line in the western territories. In the Court's judgment, this would constitute the government depriving slaveowners of their property-since slaves were legally the property of their owners-without due process of law, which is forbidden under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Taney also reasoned that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights implicitly precluded any possibility of constitutional rights for black African slaves and their descendants. Thus, Taney concluded:

Now, ... the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. ... Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the [36°N 36' latitude] line therein mentioned is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void....

Taney held that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, marking the first time since the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme Court had struck down a federal law, although the Missouri Compromise had already been effectively overridden by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Taney made this argument on a narrow definition of the Property Clause of Section 3 of Article 4 of the Constitution. The Property Clause states, "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States..." Taney made the argument that the Property Clause "applied only to the property which the States held in common at that time, and has no reference whatever to any territory or other property which the new sovereignty might afterwards itself acquire." Taney asserted that because the Northwest Territory was not part of the United States at the time of the Constitution's ratification, Congress did not have the authority to ban slavery in the territory. According to Taney, the Missouri Compromise exceeded the scope of Congress's powers and was unconstitutional, and thus Dred Scott was still a slave regardless of his time spent in the parts of the Northwest Territory that were north of 36°N, and he was still a slave under Missouri law, and the Court had to follow Missouri law in the matter. For all these reasons, the Court concluded that Scott could not bring suit in U.S. federal court.

Justices Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean were the only two dissenters from the Court's decision, and both filed dissenting opinions.

Curtis's 67-page dissent argued that the Court's conclusion that black people could not possess federal U.S. citizenship was legally and historically baseless. Curtis pointed out that at the time of the Constitution's adoption in 1789, black men could vote in five of the 13 states. Legally, that made them citizens of both their individual states and the United States federally. Curtis cited many state statutes and state court decisions supporting his position. His dissent was "extremely persuasive", and it prompted Taney to add 18 additional pages to his opinion in an attempt to rebut Curtis's arguments.

McLean's dissent deemed the argument that black people could not be citizens "more a matter of taste than of law". He attacked much of the Court's decision as obiter dicta that was not legally authoritative on the ground that once the court determined that it did not have jurisdiction to hear Scott's case, it should have simply dismissed the action, rather than passing judgment on the merits of the claims.

Curtis and McLean both attacked the Court's overturning of the Missouri Compromise on its merits. They noted that it was not necessary to decide the question and that none of the authors of the Constitution had ever objected on constitutional grounds to the Congress's adoption of the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Continental Congress or the subsequent acts that barred slavery north of 36°30' N, or the prohibition on importing slaves from overseas passed in 1808. Curtis said slavery was not listed in the constitution as a "natural right", but rather a creation of municipal law. He pointed out the constitution said "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State." Since slavery was not mentioned as an exception, he felt a prohibition of it fell within the scope of needed rules and regulations Congress was free to pass.

The Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott was "greeted with unmitigated wrath from every segment of the United States except the slave holding states." The American political historian Robert G. McCloskey described:

The tempest of malediction that burst over the judges seems to have stunned them; far from extinguishing the slavery controversy, they had fanned its flames and had, moreover, deeply endangered the security of the judicial arm of government. No such vilification as this had been heard even in the wrathful days following the Alien and Sedition Acts. Taney's opinion was assailed by the Northern press as a wicked "stump speech" and was shamefully misquoted and distorted. "If the people obey this decision," said one newspaper, "they disobey God."

Many Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, who was rapidly becoming the leading Republican in Illinois, regarded the decision as part of a plot to expand and eventually impose the legalization of slavery throughout all of the states. Some southern extremists wanted all states to recognize slavery as a constitutional right. Lincoln rejected the court's majority opinion that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution," pointing out that the constitution did not ever mention property in reference to slaves and in fact explicitly referred to them as "persons". Southern Democrats considered Republicans to be lawless rebels who were provoking disunion by their refusal to accept the Supreme Court's decision as the law of the land. Many northern opponents of slavery offered a legal argument for refusing to recognize the Dred Scott decision on the Missouri Compromise as binding. They argued that the Court's determination that the federal courts had no jurisdiction to hear the case rendered the remainder of the decision obiter dictum-a non binding passing remark rather than an authoritative interpretation of the law. Douglas attacked that position in the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

Mr. Lincoln goes for a warfare upon the Supreme Court of the United States, because of their judicial decision in the Dred Scott case. I yield obedience to the decisions in that court-to the final determination of the highest judicial tribunal known to our constitution.

In a speech at Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln responded that the Republican Party was not seeking to defy the Supreme Court, but he hoped they could convince it to reverse its ruling.

We believe, as much as Judge Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendment of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.

Democrats had refused to accept the court's interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as permanently binding. During the Andrew Jackson administration, Taney, then Attorney General, had written:

Whatever may be the force of the decision of the Supreme Court in binding the parties and settling their rights in the particular case before them, I am not prepared to admit that a construction given to the constitution by the Supreme Court in deciding any one or more cases fixes of itself irrevokably [ sic] and permanently its construction in that particular and binds the states and the Legislative and executive branches of the General government, forever afterwards to conform to it and adopt it in every other case as the true reading of the instrument although all of them may unite in believing it erroneous.

Frederick Douglass, a prominent black abolitionist who considered the decision to be unconstitutional and Taney's reasoning contrary to the Founding Fathers' vision, predicted that political conflict could not be avoided:

The highest authority has spoken. The voice of the Supreme Court has gone out over the troubled waves of the National Conscience.... [But] my hopes were never brighter than now. I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies....

According to Jefferson Davis, then a U.S. Senator from Mississippi, and future President of the Confederate States of America, the case merely "presented the question whether Cuffee [a derogatory term for a black person] should be kept in his normal condition or not . . . [and] whether the Congress of the United States could decide what might or might not be property in a Territory-the case being that of an officer of the army sent into a Territory to perform his public duty, having taken with him his negro slave".

Irene Emerson moved to Massachusetts in 1850 and married Calvin C. Chaffee, a doctor and abolitionist who was elected to Congress on the Know Nothing and Republican tickets. Following the Supreme Court ruling, pro-slavery newspapers attacked Chaffee as a hypocrite. Chaffee protested that Dred Scott belonged to his brother-in-law and that he had nothing to do with Scott's enslavement. Nevertheless, the Chaffees executed a deed transferring the Scott family to Henry Taylor Blow, the son of Scott's former owner, Peter Blow. Chaffee's lawyer suggested the transfer as the most convenient way of freeing Scott since Missouri law required manumitters to appear in person before the court.

Taylor Blow filed the manumission papers with Judge Hamilton on May 26, 1857. The emancipation of Dred Scott and his family was national news and was celebrated in northern cities. Scott worked as a porter in a hotel in St. Louis, where he was a minor celebrity. His wife took in laundry. Dred Scott died of tuberculosis on November 7, 1858. Harriet died on June 17, 1876.

Economist Charles Calomiris and historian Larry Schweikart discovered that uncertainty about whether the entire West would suddenly become slave territory or engulfed in combat like " Bleeding Kansas" gripped the markets immediately. The east-west railroads collapsed immediately (although north-south lines were unaffected), causing, in turn, the near-collapse of several large banks and the runs that ensued. What followed the runs has been called the Panic of 1857.

The Panic of 1857, unlike the Panic of 1837, almost exclusively impacted the North, a fact that Calomiris and Schweikart attribute to the South's system of branch banking, as opposed to the North's system of unit banking. In the South's branch banking system, information moved reliably among the branch banks and transmission of the panic was minor. Northern unit banks, in contrast, were competitors and seldom shared such vital information.

Southerners, who had grown uncomfortable with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, argued that they had a constitutional right to bring slaves into the territories, regardless of any decision by a territorial legislature on the subject. The Dred Scott decision seemed to endorse that view.

Although Taney believed that the decision represented a compromise that would be a final settlement of the slavery question by transforming a contested political issue into a matter of settled law, the decision produced the opposite result. It strengthened Northern opposition to slavery, divided the Democratic Party on sectional lines, encouraged secessionist elements among Southern supporters of slavery to make bolder demands, and strengthened the Republican Party.

In 1860, the Republican Party explicitly rejected the Dred Scott verdict in their official platform, stating "the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition, and with legislative and judicial precedent; is revolutionary in its tendency, and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country."

In 1859, when defending John Anthony Copeland and Shields Green from the charge of treason, following their participation in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, their attorney, George Sennott, cited the Dred Scott decision in arguing successfully that since they were not citizens according to that Supreme Court ruling, they could not commit treason. The charge of treason was dropped, but they were found guilty and executed on other charges.

Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenting vote in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which declared racial segregation constitutional and created the concept of " separate but equal". In his dissent, Harlan wrote that the majority's opinion would "prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case".

Charles Evans Hughes, writing in 1927 on the Supreme Court's history, described Dred Scott v. Sandford as a "self-inflicted wound" from which the court would not recover for many years.

In a memo to Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952, for whom he was clerking, on the subject of Brown v. Board of Education, the future Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that " Scott v. Sandford was the result of Taney's effort to protect slaveholders from legislative interference."

Justice Antonin Scalia made the comparison between Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and Dred Scott in an effort to see overturned:

Dred Scott ... rested upon the concept of " substantive due process" that the Court praises and employs today. Indeed, Dred Scott was very possibly the first application of substantive due process in the Supreme Court, the original precedent for... .

Scalia noted that the Dred Scott decision had been written and championed by Taney and left the justice's reputation irrevocably tarnished. Taney, who was attempting to end the disruptive question of the future of slavery, wrote a decision that "inflamed the national debate over slavery and deepened the divide that led ultimately to the American Civil War".

Chief Justice John Roberts compared Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) to Dred Scott, as another example of trying to settle a contentious issue through a ruling that went beyond the scope of the Constitution.

1977: The Scotts' great-grandson John A. Madison, Jr., an attorney, gave the invocation at the ceremony at the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, a National Historic Landmark, for the dedication of a National Historic Marker commemorating the Scotts' case tried there.

2000: Harriet and Dred Scott's petition papers in their freedom suit were displayed at the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, following the discovery of more than 300 freedom suits in the archives of the U.S. circuit court.

2006: A new historic plaque was erected at the Old Courthouse to honor the active roles of both Dred and Harriet Scott in their freedom suit and the case's significance in U.S. history.

2012: A monument depicting Dred and Harriet Scott was erected at the Old Courthouse's east entrance facing the St. Louis Gateway Arch.

1. ^ Hall, Kermit (1992). Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. Oxford University Press. p. 889. ISBN 9780195176612. American legal and constitutional scholars consider the Dred Scott decision to be the worst ever rendered by the Supreme Court. Historians have abundantly documented its role in crystallizing attitudes that led to war. Taney's opinion stands as a model of censurable judicial craft and failed judicial statesmanship.

2. ^ Urofsky, Melvin (January 5, 2023). "Dred Scott decision | Definition, History, Summary, Significance, & Facts | Britannica". Encyclopædia Britannica. Among constitutional scholars, Scott v. Sandford is widely considered the worst decision ever rendered by the Supreme Court. It has been cited in particular as the most egregious example in the court's history of wrongly imposing a judicial solution on a political problem. A later chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, famously characterized the decision as the court's great "self-inflicted wound."

3. ^ Carrafiello, Michael L. (Spring 2010). "Diplomatic Failure: James Buchanan's Inaugural Address". Pennsylvania History. 77 (2): 145-165. doi:10.5325/pennhistory.77.2.0145. JSTOR 10.5325/pennhistory.77.2.0145.

4. Roberta Alexander, "Dred Scott: The decision that sparked a civil war." ^ Northern Kentucky Law Review 34 (2007): 643+ excerpt.

5. David W, Blight, "Was the Civil War Inevitable?" ^ The New York Times Dec. 22, 2022

6. ^ ""No Rights Which the White Man was Bound to Respect": The Dred Scott Decision | ACS". March 19, 2007.

7. ^ ""No Rights Which the White Man was Bound to Respect": The Dred Scott Decision | ACS". March 19, 2007.

8. ^ Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (2001)

9. ^ Ehrlich, Walter (2007). They Have No Rights: Dred Scott's Struggle for Freedom. Applewood Books.

10. ^ Gardner, Eric (Spring 2007). "'You Have No Business to Whip Me': The Freedom Suits of Polly Wash and Lucy Ann Delaney". African American Review. 41 (1): 40, 47. JSTOR 40033764.

11. Lawson, John, ed. (1921). American State Trials. Vol. 13. St. Louis: Thomas Law Book Company. pp. 237-238.

12. ^ Finkelman, Paul (December 2006). "Scott v. Sandford: The Court's Most Dreadful Case and How It Changed History". Chicago-Kent Law Review. 82 (1): 25 - via Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law.

13. Boman, Dennis K. (2000). "The Dred Scott Case Reconsidered: The Legal and Political Context in Missouri". American Journal of Legal History. 44 (4): 421, 423-424, 426. doi:10.2307/3113785. JSTOR 3113785.

14. ^ Ehrlich, Walter (September 1968). "Was the Dred Scott Case Valid?". The Journal of American History. Organization of American Historians. 55 (2): 256-265. doi:10.2307/1899556. JSTOR 1899556.

15. ^ Hardy, David T. (2012). "Dred Scott, John San(d)ford, and the Case for Collusion" (PDF). Northern Kentucky Law Review. 41 (1). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 10, 2015.

16. ^ Faragher, John Mack; et al. (2005). Out of Many: A History of the American People (Revised Printing (4th Ed) ed.). Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall. p. 388. ISBN 0131951300.

17. ^ "Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) Excerpts From Majority and Dissenting Opinions". Bill of Rights Institute.

18. ^ Don E. Fehrenbacher (1978/2001), The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, reprint, New York: Oxford, Part 3, "Consequences and Echoes", Chapter 18, "The Judges Judged", p. 441; unpublished opinion, transcript in Carl B. Swisher Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

19. ^ Address to the United States Senate on May 7, 1860, reprinted as Appendix F to Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1880).

20. Rehnquist, William. ^ "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" Archived 2008-09-21 at the Wayback Machine

21. ^ Carey, Patrick W. (April 2002). "Political Atheism: Dred Scott, Roger Brooke Taney, and Orestes A. Brownson". The Catholic Historical Review. The Catholic University of America Press. 88 (2): 207-229. doi:10.1353/cat.2002.0072. ISSN 1534-0708. S2CID 153950640.

22. ^ Arenson, Adam (2010), "Dred Scott versus the Dred Scott Case", The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law, Ohio University Press, p. 36, ISBN 978-0821419120

23. ^ Patrick, Robert (August 18, 2015). "St. Louis judges want sculpture to honor slaves who sought freedom here". stltoday.com. Attendees get their first look after the unveiling of the new Dred and Harriet Scott statue on the grounds of the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis on Friday, June 8, 2012.

Arenson, Adam (2010). "Dred Scott Versus the Dred Scott Case". In Konig, David Thomas; Finkelman, Paul; Bracey, Christopher Alan (eds.). The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0821419120.

Chemerinsky, Erwin (2019). Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies (6th ed.). New York: Wolters Kluwer. ISBN 978-1454895749.

Ehrlich, Walter (1968). "Was the Dred Scott Case Valid?". The Journal of American History. 55 (2): 256-265. doi:10.2307/1899556. JSTOR 1899556.

Finkelman, Paul (2007). "Scott v. Sandford: The Court's Most Dreadful Case and How it Changed History" (PDF). Chicago-Kent Law Review. 82 (3): 3-48.

Hughes, Charles Evans (1936) [1928]. The Supreme Court of the United States. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0231085670.

McCloskey, Robert G. (2010). The American Supreme Court. Revised by Sanford Levinson (5th ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226556864.

Nowak, John E.; Rotunda, Ronald D. (2012). Treatise on Constitutional Law: Substance and Procedure (5th ed.). Eagan, MN: West Thomson/Reuters. OCLC 798148265.

Vishneski, John S. (1988). "What the Court Decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford". American Journal of Legal History. 32 (4): 373-390. doi:10.2307/845743. JSTOR 845743.

Allen, Austin. Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court 1837-1857. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Dennis-Jonathan Mann & Kai P. Purnhagen: The Nature of Union Citizenship between Autonomy and Dependency on (Member) State Citizenship - A Comparative Analysis of the Rottmann Ruling, or: How to Avoid a European Dred Scott Decision?, in: 29:3 Wisconsin International Law Journal (WILJ), (Fall 2011), pp. 484-533 (PDF).

Fehrenbacher, Don E., The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. New York: Oxford (1978) [winner of Pulitzer Prize for History].

Fehrenbacher, Don E. Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective (1981) [abridged version of The Dred Scott Case].

Finkelman, Paul. Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018. Review

Konig, David Thomas, Paul Finkelman, and Christopher Alan Bracey, eds. The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law (Ohio University Press; 2010) 272 pages; essays by scholars on the history of the case and its afterlife in American law and society.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976) pp. 267-96.

VanderVelde, Lea. Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier (Oxford University Press, 2009) 480 pp.

Swain, Gwenyth (2004). Dred and Harriet Scott: A Family's Struggle for Freedom. Saint Paul, MN: Borealis Books. ISBN 978-0873514828.

Tushnet, Mark (2008). I Dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 31-44. ISBN 978-0807000366.

Listen to: American Pendulum II - 🔊 Listen Now: American Pendulum II

Texts on Wikisource:

Text of Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857) is available from:Cornell Findlaw Justia Library of Congress OpenJurist Oyez (oral argument audio)

The Dred Scott decision. Opinion of Chief Justice Taney, with an introduction by Dr. J. H. Van Evrie. Also, an appendix, containing an essay on the natural history of the prognathous race of mankind, originally written for the New York Day-book, by Dr. S. A. Cartwright, of New Orleans. New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co. 1863.

Primary documents and bibliography about the Dred Scott case, from the Library of Congress

"Dred Scott decision", Encyclopædia Britannica 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 17 December 2006. www.yowebsite.com

Gregory J. Wallance, "Dred Scott Decision: The Lawsuit That Started The Civil War", History.net, originally in Civil War Times Magazine, March/April 2006

Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, National Park Service

Infography about the Dred Scott Case

The Dred Scott Case Collection, Washington University in St. Louis

Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice

Dred Scott case articles from William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator

"Supreme Court Landmark Case Dred Scott v. Sandford" from C-SPAN's Landmark Cases: Historic Supreme Court Decisions

Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott Versus John F.A. Sandford. December Term, 1856 via Google Books

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Dred Scott v. Sandford , 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and thus they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens.

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Abolitionist John Brown leads a small group to attack Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Known as “John Brown’s Raid.”

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On the evening of October 16, 1859 John Brown, a staunch abolitionist, and a group of his supporters left their farmhouse hide-out en route to Harpers Ferry. Descending upon the town in the early hours of October 17th, Brown and his men captured prominent citizens and seized the federal armory and arsenal. Brown had hopes that the local slave population would join the raid and through the raid's success weapons would be supplied to slaves and freedom fighters throughout the country; this was not to be. First held down by the local militia in the late morning of the 17th, Brown took refuge in the arsenal's engine house. However, this sanctuary from the fire storm did not last long, when in the late afternoon US Marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived and stormed the engine house, killing many of the raiders and capturing Brown. Brown was quickly placed on trial and charged with treason against the state of Virginia, murder, and slave insurrection. Brown was sentenced to death for his crimes and hanged on December 2, 1859.

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On the evening of October 16, 1859 John Brown, a staunch abolitionist, and a group of his supporters left their farmhouse hide-out en route to Harpers Ferry...

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Lincoln is elected the sixteenth U.S. president.

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Seven Southern states secede.

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War Declared: States Secede from the Union! - Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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When Abraham Lincoln won the U.S election of 1860, many southern states followed South Carolina in succeeding from the Union. This article provides dates of each states’ secession from the Union.

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Formation of The Confederate States of America

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Formation of The Confederate States of America

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The Confederate States of America is formed and Jefferson Davis is elected president.

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Confederate victory at Fort Sumter.

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The attack on Fort Sumter marked the official beginning of the American Civil War-a war that lasted four years, cost the lives of more than 620,000 Americans, and freed 3.9 million enslaved people from bondage.

How it ended

Confederate victory. With supplies nearly exhausted and his troops outnumbered, Union major Robert Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter to Brig. Gen. P.G.T Beauregard's Confederate forces. Major Anderson and his men were allowed to strike their colors, fire a 100-gun salute, and board a ship bound for New York, where they were greeted as heroes. Both the North and South immediately called for volunteers to mobilize for war.

In context

By 1861, the country had already experienced decades of short-lived but ultimately failed compromises concerning the expansion of slavery in the United States and its territories. The election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States in 1860-a man who declared "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free"-threatened the culture and economy of southern slave states and served as a catalyst for secession. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the United States, and by February 2, 1861, six more states followed suit. Southern delegates met on February 4, 1861, in Montgomery, AL., and established the Confederate States of America, with Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis elected as its provisional president. Confederate militia forces began seizing United States forts and property throughout the south. With a lame-duck president in office, and a controversial president-elect poised to succeed him, the crisis approached a boiling point and exploded at Fort Sumter.

Before the Battle

In Charleston, the birthplace of secession, tempers are on edge. A delegation from the state goes to Washington, D.C., demanding the surrender of the Federal military installations in the new "independent republic of South Carolina." President James Buchanan refuses to comply. Charleston is the Confederacy's most important port on the Southeast coast. The harbor is defended by three federal forts: Sumter; Castle Pinckney, one mile off the city's Battery; and heavily armed Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan's Island. Major Anderson's command is based at Fort Moultrie, but with its guns pointed out to sea, it cannot defend a land attack. On December 26, Charlestonians awake to discover that Anderson and his tiny garrison of 90 men have slipped away from Fort Moultrie to the more defensible Fort Sumter. For secessionists, Anderson's move is, as one Charlestonian wrote to a friend, "like casting a spark into a magazine,"

Adding to the major's concern is his dangerously dwindling store of supplies. On January 5, 1861, the Star of the West departs from New York with some 200 reinforcements and provisions for the Sumter garrison. As the ship approaches Charleston Harbor on January 9, cadets from the Citadel fire, forcing the crew to abandon its mission. On March 1, Jefferson Davis orders Brig. Gen P.G.T. Beauregard to take command of the growing southern forces in Charleston. On April 4, Lincoln informs southern delegates that he intends to attempt to resupply Fort Sumter, as its garrison is now critically in need. To South Carolinians, any attempt to reinforce Sumter means war. "Now the issue of battle is to be forced upon us," declared the Charleston Mercury. "We will meet the invader, and the God of Battles must decide the issue between the hostile hirelings of Abolition hate and Northern tyranny."

On April 9, Davis and the Confederate cabinet decide to "strike a blow!" Davis orders Beauregard to take Fort Sumter. The next day, three of Beauregard's aides sail to the fort and courteously demand the garrison's surrender. Anderson is equally courteous, but refuses: "I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication demanding the evacuation of this fort, and to say, in reply thereto, that it is a demand with which I regret that my sense of honor, and of my obligations to my Government, prevent my compliance." He also informs the delegation that the garrison's supplies will only last until April 15.

During the Battle

April 12. At 4:30 a.m., a flaming mortar shot arcs into the air and explodes over Fort Sumter. On this signal, Confederate guns from fortifications and floating batteries around Charleston Harbor roar to life. Outmanned, outgunned, undersupplied, and nearly surrounded by enemy batteries, Anderson waits until around 7:00 a.m. to respond. Captain Abner Doubleday volunteers to fire the first cannon at the Confederates, a 32-pound shot that bounces off the roof of the Iron Battery on Cummings Point.

For nearly 36 hours the two sides keep up this unequal contest. A shell strikes the flagpole of Fort Sumter, and the American colors fall to the earth, only to be hoisted back up the hastily repaired pole. Confederates fire hotshot from Fort Moultrie into Fort Sumter. Buildings begin to burn within the fort. With no more resources, Anderson surrenders Fort Sumter to Confederate forces.

April 13. At 2:30 p.m., Maj. Anderson and his men strike their colors and prepare to leave the fort. Sadly, the only casualties at Fort Sumter come during the 100-gun salute, when a round explodes prematurely, killing Pvt. Daniel Hough and mortally wounding another soldier. The attack is over, but the war had just begun.

Aftermath

Following the evacuation of Major Robert Anderson and his Federal garrison on the afternoon of April 14, 1861, Fort Sumter is occupied initially by Confederate troops of Company B of the First South Carolina Artillery Battalion and a volunteer company of the Palmetto Guard, a local militia unit. The fort remains in Confederate hands for the next four years until all Confederate forces evacuate Charleston on the evening of February 17, 1865.

Despite having surrendered, Anderson and his men are greeted as heroes when they disembark in New York. Capt. Abner Doubleday notes later that "all the passing steamers saluted us with their steam-whistles and bells, and cheer after cheer went up from the ferry boats and vessels in the harbor." Anderson's valor during the attack and commitment to duty are praised by the Union. Beauregard is also hailed for this first Confederate victory. He is later ordered to direct the troops at Bull Run.

Fort Sumter: Featured Resources

Related Battles

Charleston Harbor, SC | April 12, 1861

Result: Confederate Victory

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Early in the morning of April 12, 1861, Confederate guns around Charleston Harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter. The American Civil War was officially upon both the North and the South. A war that lasted four years and cost the lives of more than 620,000 Americans.

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New Additions to the Confederate States of America

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New Additions to the Confederate States of America

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Four more states join the Confederate States of America.

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Confederate Memorial State Historic Site

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The First National Flag -- Stars and Bars May 4, 1861 - May 1, 1863 The Confederate States of America solicited designs for a national flag early in 1861. Hundreds of designs were submitted and on May 4, 1861, the First National Flag was adopted (there would eventually be two others).

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Confederate victory at the Battle of Bull Run.

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First Manassas (Bull Run) page with maps, photos, history articles, and preservation news

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Union victory at the Battle of Shiloh.

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Our Battle of Shiloh page includes history articles, battle maps, photos, web links, and the latest preservation news for this important 1862 Civil War battle in Tennessee.

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Confederate victories of the Seven Days Battle.

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February 4, 2009 • Updated February 29, 2024

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Learn more about the Seven Days Battles in June and July of 1862 from historian William Miller.

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Union victory at the Battle of Antietam.

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Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation.

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President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, announcing, "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious areas "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Initially, the Civil War between North and South was fought by the North to prevent the secession of the Southern states and preserve the Union. Even though sectional conflicts over slavery had been a major cause of the war, ending slavery was not a goal of the war.

That changed on September 22, 1862, when President Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which stated that enslaved people in those states or parts of states still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, would be declared free. One hundred days later, with the rebellion unabated, President issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious areas "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Lincoln's bold step to change the goals of the war was a military measure and came just a few days after the Union's victory in the Battle of Antietam. With this Proclamation he hoped to inspire all Black people, and enslaved people in the Confederacy in particular, to support the Union cause and to keep England and France from giving political recognition and military aid to the Confederacy.

Because it was a military measure, however, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Union control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it did fundamentally transform the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of Black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

From the first days of the Civil War, enslaved people had acted to secure their own liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically. As a milestone along the road to slavery's final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom.

Transcript

By the President of the United States of America:

A Proclamation.

Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

"That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States."

Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit:

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth[)], and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.

By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN
WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.

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EnlargeDownload Link Citation: Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863; Presidential Proclamations, 1791-1991; Record Group 11; General Records of the United States Government; National Archives.

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Union victory at the Battle of Vicksburg.

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Battle of Vicksburg: Siege, Battlefield & Park - HISTORY

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The Battle of Vicksburg, and the subsequent Siege of Vicksburg, were decisive victories for the Union over the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.

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Lincoln gives the Gettysburg Address.

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Atlanta Falls in a Union victory.

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Union General Sherman leads his March to the Sea and takes over Atlanta.

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Abraham Lincoln is re-elected.

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Confederate General Lee surrenders at Appomattox Courthouse.

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President Lincoln is assassinated.

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Lincoln’s Assassination — Ford’s Theatre

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On the morning of April 14, 1865 (Good Friday), actor John Wilkes Booth learned President Abraham Lincoln would attend a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin that night at Ford’s Theatre—a theatre Booth frequently performed at. He realized his moment had arrived.

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The 13th Amendment is added to the U.S. Constitution, ending slavery in the United States.

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The 14th Amendment is added to the U.S. Constitution, granting citizenship to all people born in the United States, including formerly enslaved persons.

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The 15th Amendment Grants Black Men Rights to Vote

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The 15th Amendment Grants Black Men Rights to Vote

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The 15th Amendment is added to the U.S. Constitution, granting Black men the right to vote.