b'APRIL 2024in the territories. The Missouri Compromise, which had served as theThe Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery, trumpeted one accepted constitutional settlement for nearly four decades, thus fell. EvenGeorgia newspaper, is now the supreme law of the land, and opposition to it the doctrine of popular sovereignty as articulated in the Kansas-Nebraskais morally treason against the Government. Act (1854)whereby the people of each federal territory would have the power to decide whether the territory would enter the Union as a free or aThe press and pulpit echoed with attacks on the decision that were as heated slave statelacked constitutional legitimacy, according to Taney. He thusas Southern defenses of it If anything, Scott v. Sandford inflamed passions voided the principles of free soil (opposition to slavery in the territories andand brought the Union even closer to dissolving.in newly admitted states), territorial sovereignty, and indeed every aspect of antislavery constitutional thought. Dred Scott did, in fact, get his freedom, but not through the courts. After he and his wife were later bought by the Blow family (who had sold Scott to Regarding the question of Scotts freedom, Taney held that Scott couldEmerson in the first place), they were freed in 1857. Scott died of tuberculosis not claim to be free on the basis of his residence in Illinois or Wisconsin.in St. Louis the following year. Harriet Scott lived until June 1876, long enough Whatever status Scott might have had while in a free state or territory, heto see the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolish slavery argued, once he had returned to Missouri his status depended entirely onin the United States. Lynn Jackson, Dred Scotts 2nd great granddaughter is local law, notwithstanding the doctrine of once free, always free. coming to Colorado May 26th to share the plight of Black Mental Health as we observe Mental Health Awareness Month. Taney would have been on reasonably strong ground had he limited himself to upholding the district courts decision based on the idea that status wasPastor T. S. Mayes, PhDto be determined by the states. Alternatively, he could have held that ScottCEOTTLT (Training Tomorrows Leaders Today)was not entitled to sue Sanford in federal court on the basis of diversity of jurisdiction, because Missouri did not allow even free African Americans to be citizens. But Taney outraged much of the North by asserting that AfricanAdvertise with UsAmericans could never be citizens of the United States. The framers, in his view, did not regard African Americans as being among the people for whose benefit and protection the new government was founded,BOCNEWS.COMnotwithstanding the perfectly general language of the Declaration of Independence and of the preamble to the Constitution.Follow us on 14'