[Illustration:  SLAVE AND FREE SOIL ON EVE OF CIVIL WAR]

=The Dred Scott Decision (1857).=—­In his inaugural, Buchanan vaguely hinted that in a forthcoming decision the Supreme Court would settle one of the vital questions of the day.  This was a reference to the Dred Scott case then pending.  Scott was a slave who had been taken by his master into the upper Louisiana territory, where freedom had been established by the Missouri Compromise, and then carried back into his old state of Missouri.  He brought suit for his liberty on the ground that his residence in the free territory made him free.  This raised the question whether the law of Congress prohibiting slavery north of 36 deg. 30’ was authorized by the federal Constitution or not.  The Court might have avoided answering it by saying that even though Scott was free in the territory, he became a slave again in Missouri by virtue of the law of that state.  The Court, however, faced the issue squarely.  It held that Scott had not been free anywhere and that, besides, the Missouri Compromise violated the Constitution and was null and void.

The decision was a triumph for the South.  It meant that Congress after all had no power to abolish slavery in the territories.  Under the decree of the highest court in the land, that could be done only by an amendment to the Constitution which required a two-thirds vote in Congress and the approval of three-fourths of the states.  Such an amendment was obviously impossible—­the Southern states were too numerous; but the Republicans were not daunted.  “We know,” said Lincoln, “the Court that made it has often overruled its own decisions and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this.”  Legislatures of Northern states passed resolutions condemning the decision and the Republican platform of 1860 characterized the dogma that the Constitution carried slavery into the territories as “a dangerous political heresy at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself ... with legislative and judicial precedent ... revolutionary in tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country.”

=The Panic of 1857.=—­In the midst of the acrimonious dispute over the Dred Scott decision, came one of the worst business panics which ever afflicted the country.  In the spring and summer of 1857, fourteen railroad corporations, including the Erie, Michigan Central, and the Illinois Central, failed to meet their obligations; banks and insurance companies, some of them the largest and strongest institutions in the North, closed their doors; stocks and bonds came down in a crash on the markets; manufacturing was paralyzed; tens of thousands of working people were thrown out of employment; “hunger meetings” of idle men were held in the cities and banners bearing the inscription, “We want bread,” were flung out.  In New York, working men threatened to invade the Council Chamber to demand “work or bread,” and the frightened mayor called for