Salem, MA

Dred Scott (Tindall, 1999)

Textbook
George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, eds., America: A Narrative History, 5th ed., vol. 1 (New York:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 703-05.
On March 6, 1857, two days after the inauguration, the Supreme Court rendered a decision in the long-pending case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.

After his master’s death in 1843 Scott apparently had tried to buy his freedom. In 1846, with help from white friends, he brought suit in Missouri courts claiming that residence in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory had made him free. A jury decided in his favor, but the state supreme court ruled against him.
America: A Narrative History

Charles Dexter Cleveland, detail

Scanned by
John Osborne, Dickinson College
Scan date
Image type
photograph
Use in Day View?
Yes
Courtesy of
Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA
Permission to use?
Yes
Source citation
Photograph Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA

Charles Dexter Cleveland

Scanned by
John Osborne, Dickinson College
Scan date
Image type
photograph
Use in Day View?
No
Courtesy of
Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA
Permission to use?
Yes
Source citation
Photograph Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA

Dred Scott (Murrin, 1999)

Textbook
John M. Murrin, et al., eds., Liberty Equality Power: A History of the American People, 2nd ed. vol. 1 (Fort Worth:  Harcourt Brace, 1999), 478-79.
The South took the offensive at the very outset of the Buchanan administration. Its instrument was the Supreme Court, which had a majority of five justices from slave states led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland. Those justices saw the Dred Scott case as an opportunity to settle once and for all the question of slavery in the territory.
Liberty Equality Power: A History of the American People

Immigration (Roark, 2002)

Textbook
James L. Roark, et al., eds., The American Promise: A History of the United States, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 466-467.
The tidal wave of immigrants that broke over American in the decade from 1845 to 1855 produced a nasty backlash among Protestant Americans, who believed they were about to drown in a sea of Roman Catholics from Ireland and Germany…The new arrivals encountered economic prejudice, ethnic hostility, and religious antagonism. Because some of them displayed a taste for whiskey and beer, they also drew the wrath of the temperance movement.
The American Promise: A History of the United States

Dred Scott (Roark, 2002)

Textbook
James L. Roark, et al., eds., The American Promise: A History of the United States, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 476.
The Republican rebuttal to Taney’s decision relied heavily on the brilliant dissenting opinion of Justice Benjamin R. Curtis. Scott was a citizen of the United States, Curtis argued. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, free black men could vote in five states and participated in the ratification process. Scott was free: Because slavery was prohibited in Wisconsin, the “involuntary servitude of a slave, coming into the Territory with his master, should cease to exist.” And the Missouri Compromise was constitutional.
The American Promise: A History of the United States

Bleeding Kansas (Nash, 1998)

Textbook
Gary B. Nash, et al., eds., The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, 4th ed. (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1998), 479.
As civil war threatened in Kansas, a Brooklyn poet, Walt Whitman, heralded American democracy in his epic poem Leaves of Grass (1855). Whitman identified himself as the embodiment of average Americans "of every hue and caste… of every rank and religion." Ebulliently, Whitman embraced urban mechanics, southern woodcutters, planters' sons, runaway slaves, mining camp prostitutes, and a catalog of others in his poetic celebration of "the word Democratic, the word En-Masse." At the same time, Whitman's faith in the American masses faltered in the mid 1850s.
The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society
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