Why was the Dred Scott decision important?

This would be a three-party election, for the American Party was still in the field, despite the exodus of most of its northern members to the Republicans. Having become mainly a way station for former southern Whigs, the party nominate ex-Whig Millard Fillmore. The three-party campaign sifts out into a pair of two-party contests: Democrats versus Americans in the South; Democrats versus Republicans in the North. Fillmore, despite a good showing of 44 percent of the popular vote in the South, carried only the single slave state of Maryland.

On the day before the sack of Lawrence, Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a bombastic and wrathful speech, "The Crime Against Kansas," in which he verbally whipped most of the U.S. Senate for complicity in slavery. Sumner singled out Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina…Two days later, a relative of Butler, Democratic representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, strode into the Senate chamber, found Sumner at his desk, and struck him repeatedly with a cane.

The sense of uniqueness and mission was as old as the Puritans, but by the 1840s the conviction of superiority had been bolstered by the young nation’s amazing success. What right had Americans, they asked, to keep the blessings of liberty, democracy, and prosperity to themselves? The west needed the civilizing power of the hammer and plow, the ballot box and pulpit, that had transformed the East.

Fighting broke out on the morning of May 21, 1856, when a mob of several hundred proslavery men entered the town of Lawrence, the center of free-state settlement.  Only one man died - a proslavery raider who was killed when a burning wall collapsed - but the 'Sack of Lawrence,' as free-soil forces called it, inflamed northern opinion.  In Kansas, news of Lawrence provoked one free-soil settler, John Brown, to 'fight fire with fire.'  Announcing that 'it was better that a score of bad men should die than that one man who came here to make Kansas a Free State should be driven

Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) was decided before the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment provides that anyone born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen of the nation and of his or her state. In this case, the Supreme Court held that a slave was property, not a citizen, and thus had no rights under the Constitution. The decision was a prime factor leading to the Civil War.

Born in the chaotic aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Republican Party sprang up in several northern states in 1854 and 1855. With the Know-Nothings' demise after 1856, the Republicans would become the main opposition to the Democratic party, and they would win each presidential election from 1860 until 1884; but in 1855 few would have predicted such a bright future. While united by opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the party held various shades of opinion in uneasy balance.

Sectional Divisions Grow

Despite Buchanan’s determination to adopt policies that would calm the growing sectional strife in the country, a series of events helped drive Americans in the North and South even further apart.

The Dred Scott Decision

Like the Compromise of 1850, which was intended to put the section conflict to rest once and for all, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act that was to enshrine the principle of non-intervention as the definitive solution to the territorial issue, the Dred Scott decision failed to accomplish what was expected of it. It annulled a law that had been repealed three years earlier and denied freedom to slaves in an area in which there were no slaves. The decision also placed obstacles in the way of sectional adjustment by stiffening southern extremist demands for constitutional protection.

With energy and skill, Douglas piloted the Kansas-Nebraska through the Senate. He maintained that the Compromise of 1850, by introducing popular sovereignty into the territory north of 36º30´, had implicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise. Although this was a specious argument – the 1850 legislation applied only to territory acquired from Mexico, not the Louisiana Purchase – it was to become Southern and Democratic orthodoxy.