The question before the court was whether or not an overt act of treason had occurred. Chief Justice John Marshall, presiding over the trial, determined that the prosecution had not established any overt act, as the law demanded, and thus barred the appearance of most of the prosecution’s witnesses because they would be testifying about a conspiracy to commit treason, which would be irrelevant. Marshall’s ruling was a devastating blow to the prosecution, and resulted in the jury’s verdict of not guilty.
Aaron Burr escaped the noose that would have accompanied conviction, but not the notoriety that clung to him. Harassed by creditors and with no prospect of a return to public life, he slipped away to Europe, where he spent some time in debtor’s prison. After an exile of about five years, during which he tried in vain to recoup his fortunes, he returned almost unnoticed to New York in 1812. He spent his remaining years as a moderately successful attorney, though he was never able to erase the stains on his reputation. He died in 1836, at age eighty.
3
Roger Taney: One Mean Supreme
George Washington owned slaves. So did Thomas Jefferson and half the other Founding Fathers. Roger Taney willingly freed his slaves out of personal principle yet it is his reputation that has been forever tarnished by his association with the “peculiar institution.” Raw deal? Well, not if you consider that it was Taney, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, who tried to cram the legitimization of human bondage into the Constitution. With the Dred Scott decision of 1857, Taney affirmed the concept that blacks were an inferior race with no rights of citizenship under the law. Furthermore, he declared that Congress had no right to limit the expansion of slavery into U.S. territories. Taney actually believed the decision would settle the long-festering slavery issue once and for all. Instead, Dred Scott inflamed it even further, dragged the nation closer to civil war, and, in the words of Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, “damned the late chief justice to everlasting fame and I fear everlasting fire.”
The Dred Scott case was fairly routine in the beginning, a decade before Roger Taney got his hands on it and made it a landmark decision. Back in 1846, it was simply about a slave named Dred Scott who sought freedom for himself and his family by suing for it in the Missouri circuit court. Scott had good reason to believe then that he would prevail. His owner, an army surgeon, had brought Scott and his family from Missouri to live with him at U.S. Army posts in Illinois and in the Wisconsin Territory, both of which prohibited slavery. Missouri courts in the past had granted freedom to enslaved persons whose owners had taken them for extended periods of residence into free states or territories under the legal principle “Once free, always free.” Scott won in the circuit court, but the verdict was appealed, and the politically charged proslavery Missouri Supreme Court reversed it. Dred Scott was still a slave in the eyes of the law. After this setback, Scott sued for freedom in federal court, but there, too, he lost. Finally, after a nearly decade-long legal odyssey, he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. He didn’t stand a chance.
Dred Scott was facing a nine-member court of which the majority were proslavery Democrats. Chief Justice Taney, having served in that capacity for nearly two decades, enjoyed a decent reputation, but, as historian Kenneth M. Stampp writes, “his judicial robes had only partially concealed his persistent partisanship, especially on matters relating to slavery and the sectional conflict.” Furthermore, Scott, though ably represented by his lawyer, Montgomery Blair, had to contend with a formidable team of opposing attorneys who argued that as a black man he was not a U.S. citizen and therefore should never have been permitted to file his suit. They also argued that when Scott was returned to Missouri, his status as a slave was determined by that state’s laws, not those of Illinois. The same concept applied to his return from the Wisconsin Territory, although the opposing attorneys broadened the argument considerably when they asserted that the restrictions against slavery imposed by Congress in the various territories under the Missouri Compromise of 1820-21 were unconstitutional in the first place. It was this argument, asserts historian Don Fehrenbacher, that converted “Dred Scott’s private case . . . into a public issue,” and turned the Supreme Court into a “public arena.”
Given the composition of the court and the tenor of the times, Dred Scott’s quest for freedom appeared to be doomed. “It seems to be the impression,” wrote Montgomery Blair, “that the Court will be adverse to my client and to the power of Congress over the Territories.” Blair probably never imagined just how adverse it would be. On the morning of March 6, 1857, a crowd of reporters and spectators crammed into the Supreme Court chamber, then housed in the U.S. Capitol building, to hear the aged and infirm chief justice deliver the court’s opinion. With trembling hands and feeble voice, Taney read for more than two hours. His voice may have been weak, but, writes Kenneth Stampp, “his words were not, for they bristled with uncompromising defiance of abolitionists, free soilers, and Republicans.” In what Stampp calls “a breathtaking example of judicial activism,” Taney had practically rewritten the Constitution to conform to his own proslavery agenda.
The chief justice devoted nearly half of his opinion to the issue of Dred Scott’s right “to sue as a citizen in a court of the United States.” The question, he said, was whether black people were to be regarded as members of the political community, “and as such become entitled to all the rights and privileges, and immunity guaranteed by [the Constitution] to the citizen.” The answer, Taney declared, was No. When the Constitution was framed, he reasoned, blacks were regarded “as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who . . . had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.” In other words, although blacks were not specifically barred from citizenship under the Constitution, that was implicit in the framers’ racist attitudes toward them.
To reinforce the argument, Taney dragged in the Declaration of Independence, saying in effect that the assertion “all men are created equal” really meant all white men. Blacks, he wrote, were not “acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.” In the “civilized and enlightened portions of the world,” they were then considered “altogether unfit to associate with the white race . . . and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and . . . might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Therefore, it was “too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race . . . formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.” The same was true for the Constitution, he said, because racial opinions were no different by the time it was framed.
After this imaginative foray into the minds and intentions of the Founding Fathers, which he conjured to deny citizenship for blacks, Taney moved on to the issue he was certain would silence the antislavery movement forever: Whether or not Congress had the power to legislate slavery in the territories, as it had for seven decades. Were Dred Scott and his family free because of their stay in a territory where slavery was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise? Not in Taney’s view, because Congress never had the authority to restrict slavery in a territory to begin with. The provision in the Constitution that allowed Congress to “make all needful rules and regulations” regarding the territories, Taney said, only applied to those belonging to the United States in 1787, not those subsequently acquired. “It was,” he wrote, “a special provision for a known and particular territory, and to meet a present emergency, and nothing more.” It was certainly not to give “supreme power of legislation.” The territories acquired since 1787, Taney asserted, were not intended to be held as colonies “and governed by Congress with absolute authority.” Nor could citizens who migrated to a territory “be ruled as mere colonists, dependent upon the will of the General Government, and to be governed by any laws it may think to impose.” Also, the people of a territory had the Fifth Amendment on their side, protecting the righ
ts of private property. And that property included slaves! So, because the Taney Court had decided that the prohibition of slavery in the Wisconsin Territory (as well as the others) was unconstitutional, and thus void, it followed, as Taney wrote, “that neither Dred Scott himself, nor any of his family, were made free by being carried into this territory.”21
As Kenneth Stampp writes, “The Court’s opinion meant, of course, that not only the slavery provision of the Missouri Compro-misebut all other acts of Congress excluding slavery from various territories had been equally unconstitutional. A restriction thus imposed on congressional power to govern the territories, unmentioned in the Constitution, unknown to its framers, undisclosed for many years thereafter, but recently devised by . . . pro-slavery partisans, was now, according to the opinion of the court, the law of the land.”
Reaction to the Dred Scott decision from abolitionists and other slavery opponents was furious. Representative John F. Potter of Wisconsin (by then a state) called it “sheer blasphemy . . . an infamous libel on our government . . . a lasting disgrace to the court from which it was issued and deeply humiliating to every American citizen.” The Chicago Tribune branded the opinion “shocking to the sensibilities and aspirations of lovers of freedom and humanity,” while the New York Tribune declared that the decision “is entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” In the New York Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant asked, “Are we to accept, without question, these new readings of the Constitution—to sit down contentedly under this disgrace—to admit that the Constitution was never before rightly understood, even by those who framed it—to consent that hereafter it shall be the slaveholders’ instead of the free men’s Constitution? Never! Never!”
Proslavery factions, on the other hand, were ecstatic. Abolition-ism, proclaimed the Richmond Enquirer, had been “staggered and stunned,” and the “diabolical doctrines” of Northern fanatics repudiated. Never before, said the Chicago Times, had the “creed of an entire political party [the Republicans] been swept away from the consideration of all honest people, by the solemn and profound adjudication of the supreme tribunal.”
But the Republican party was hardly swept away by the Dred Scott decision; rather, it was given renewed energy and focus that helped elect Abraham Lincoln in 1860. As the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass said in a speech, “All measures devised and executed with a view to . . . diminish the antislavery agitation, have only served to increase, intensify, and embolden that agitation.”
Dred Scott did not live to see slavery abolished under the law, but soon after the Supreme Court decision he and his family were purchased and immediately freed. Scott died the following year. Roger Taney served on the Supreme Court until his death in 1864. His last years were not happy ones, plagued by poor health and the ultimate failure of his attempt to bend the Constitution to conform to his own vision. “There was no sadder figure to be seen in Washington during the years of the Civil War than that of the aged Chief Justice,” wrote one contemporary. “His form was bent by the weight of years, and his thin, nervous, and deeply-furrowed face was shaded by long, gray locks, and lighted up by large, melancholy eyes that looked wearily out from under shaggy brows, which gave him a weird, wizard-like expression. He had outlived his epoch, and was shunned and hated by the men of the new time of storm and struggle for the principles of freedom and nationality.”
In his history of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist acknowledges that the Taney Court “went totally awry” with the Dred Scott case, and that his predecessor’s opinion was a “serious mistake.” But, he argues, “that opinion should not be allowed to blot out the very constructive work done otherwise in his career.” If only history was that accommodating. “Taney,” the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner predicted, “will be hooted down the pages of history.” And indeed he has been. Who really remembers any other decisions rendered by this chief justice, wise or unwise, anyway? Or that he freed his own slaves long before the law demanded it? Dred Scott was a tumor on Taney’s reputation that turned out to be malignant.
4
Henry Wirz: Manufactured Monster
Infamy is arbitrary. Usually it’s reserved for only the worthiest of villains, but there are occasions when infamy is bestowed a little less selectively. So it was with Henry Wirz, the Swiss immigrant who came to personify all the evils of prisoner abuse during the Civil War. He was hanged for it, too. Wirz, however, was not the source of all the misery, but merely a cog in a terrible machine. Union and Confederate prisoners alike endured unimaginable suffering at places like Point Lookout, Maryland, and Belle Island, Virginia. But while these infernos have faded into history and are largely forgotten, the Confederate prison camp called Andersonville still evokes horror. It was Henry Wirz’s misfortune to have been Andersonville’s commander, for it was his camp that came under the most intense scrutiny after the war and his life and reputation alone that were sacrificed because of it.
To be sure, the victorious Union could not have targeted a less sympathetic character to atone for the sins of so many. Foul-mouthed and short-tempered, Wirz earned the undying enmity of many prisoners.
Recalled one:
He would frequently give way to paroxysms of rage so violent as to verge closely on insanity. Brandishing the fearful and wonderful revolver of which I have spoken, in such a manner as to threaten the luckless captives with instant death, he would shriek out imprecations, curses and foul epithets in French, German and English until he fairly frothed at the mouth. One of “Old Switzer’s” favorite ways of ending these seances was to inform the boys that he would have them shot in an hour or so and bid them to prepare for death. After keeping them in fearful suspense for hours, he would order them to be punished with the stocks, the ball-and-chain, the chain gang or, if his fierce mood had burned itself out, as was quite likely with a man of his shallow brain and vacillating temper, simply to be returned to the stockade.
Wirz’s unpleasant disposition alone would not have been enough to convict him of war crimes, as the North was determined to do, but the prison camp he ran in a remote corner of Georgia provided more than enough ammunition. Dante himself would have been hard-pressed to conjure a place as hellish as Andersonville, where thousands upon thousands of men died of disease and starvation in their own filth. “The smell is fearful!” wrote prisoner Robert Knox Sneden in his diary. “The rains washes the prison filth by the natural declivity of the ground on both sides of the brook [running through the camp] which by constant tramping of the men, kneaded the filth into a muck several inches deep of sand, feces, decomposing vegetable matters, and grease from the cook house outside, in which maggots and flies germinated, and worms, and other species of vermin festered and fattened all about the camp proper. The same filth accumulated while naked skeleton-like corpses lay around in every direction, encroaching on the living, who lay helplessly sick in holes covered partly by ragged blankets, parts of old overcoats, or any other shelter which they had erected from the fierce heat of the sun.”
“And now our Sorrow has fairly begun,” wrote one Pennsylvanian upon first entering the stockaded camp that held around 41,000 Union prisoners of war between February 1864 and April 1865. Carved out of what was once idyllic farmland, Andersonville at one point became the fifth largest city in the Confederacy, albeit a city of the damned where starving men were reduced to foraging through human feces for the slightest morsel of nutrition and roving bands of “Raiders” preyed upon their fellow prisoners, stealing their meager possessions and clubbing to death anyone who dared resist. “The condition of the prison at Andersonville is a reproach to us as a nation,” one Confederate officer wrote, perhaps after sampling some of the food from the camp kitchen. The fare, when it was provided at all, usually consisted of a few ounces of rancid meat, which often had to be eaten raw, accompanied by bug-infested corn mush with the husks ground in. Chronic malnutrition res
ulted in a number of maladies, including scurvy, while all manner of other diseases swept through the prison camp as well. The few available remedies were primitive and often barbaric, killing far more than they cured. And where disease and starvation failed to take their toll, despair frequently did. Many men simply went mad. “The cases of insanity were numerous,” wrote prisoner Charles Hopkins. “Men, strong in mentality, heart and hope were in a few short months, yes, often in a few weeks, reduced to imbeciles and maniacs.”
The Civil War ended in April 1865, and Andersonville was liberated. A month later Henry Wirz was arrested. Stories of the brutal conditions at Andersonville, and Wirz’s complicity in them, had been spreading for months—each tale more sinister than the last. By the end of the war, the people of the North clamored for revenge against “the demon of Andersonville.” Wirz, however, consistently maintained that the prisoners’ plight was beyond his control. “My conscience is clear,” he wrote in a letter to the New York News from his prison cell in Washington, D.C. “I have never dealt cruelly with a person under my charge. If they suffered for want of shelter, food, clothing and necessaries, I could not help it, having no control over these things—things which the Confederate Government could give only in very limited quantity, even to our own men, as everybody knows who will be just and impartial.”
A Treasury of Great American Scandals Page 17
