Posted on 10/18/2020 6:12:27 AM PDT by blueyon
Rustbucket is correct. I inadvertently spelled it the way it was pronounced. I stand corrected.
The dissenter who left the Supreme Court in protest of the Dred Scott Decision was Benjamin R. Curtis. You might be interested in his opinion of the Massachusetts' Personal Liberty Bills and what they were likely to result in. From the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper of December 20, 1860 (my bold emphasis below):
THE CITIZENS OF MASSACHUSETTS AND THE PERSONAL LIBERTY BILLS
Chief Justice Shaw, B. R. Curtis, Joel Parker, and other citizens of Massachusetts equally distinguished, have addressed a letter to the people of that State on the Personal Liberty Bills, which they declare to be unconstitutional. They urge strongly the repeal of them and say:
We know it is doubted by some whether the present is an opportune moment to abrogate them. It is said -- We grant these laws are wrong, but will you repeal them under a threat? We answer no. We would do nothing under a threat. We would repeal them under our own love of right; under our own sense of sacredness of compacts; under our own convictions of the inestimable importance of social order and domestic peace; under our feeling of responsibility to the memory of our fathers and the welfare of our children, and not under any threat. We would not be prevented from repealing them by any conduct of others, if such repeal were in accordance with our own sense of right.
He who refuses to do a right thing meerly because he is threatened with evil consequences, acts in subjection to the threat. His false pride may enable him to disregard the threat, but he lacks the courage to dispise the wrong estimate of his own conduct, which conduct he knows would spring from his own love of duty. If every right-minded man must admit that he ought to govern his own conduct by these principles, are they applicable to the conduct of a great and populous State? On what ground can it be maintained that hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens are to be subjected to suffereing, because the false pride of their rulers refuses to do right? Mankind have been afflicted long enough and greviously enough by commotions and strifes and wars springing from such causes. We had hoped that the nature of our government would protect us from swelling the great sum of human misery, produced by the evil passions of rulers. We had hoped that, inasmuch as the masses of people can have no interest but to do right, they would have the discernment to perceive and the manlyness to do it, and would be too calm, too wise, too magnanimous intentionally to persevere in any wrong, and we hope so still.
But what is meant by the exhortation not to repeal these laws under a threat? Who threatens us if they should not be repealed?
Whatever may have been true in the past, whatever faults of speech and action may have been committed on the one side or the other, we firmly believe that the men from whom the worst consequences to our country and ourselves are likely to proceed, have no wish that these laws should be repealed, and no disposition to use any threats in reference to them. On the contrary, they desire to have them stand as conspicuous and palpable breaches of the national compact by ourselves; and as affording justification to themselves, to the world and to posterity, for the destruction of the most perfect and prosperous government which the Providence of God has ever permitted the wisdom of man to devise.
Lemuel Shaw was Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
Benjamin R. Curtis was a former Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. He resigned from the Supreme Court in protest of its Dred Scott decision.
Joel Parker was professor of constitutional law at Harvard and former Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
The Massachusetts Personal Liberty Law made it more expensive for a slave owner to recover a slave from Massachusetts than the slave was worth. The last slave returned to his owner from Massachusetts was in 1854. A mob attacked the Courthouse where the slave's case was being heard. Axes were used to break through the Courthouse doors. The guards inside the Courthouse repulsed the mob, but one of the guards was killed. The Boston mayor then called up companies of artillery, federal troops and marines to help the civil authorities. Days later the slave was taken to the harbor surrounded by about 200 troops who cleared the way. The slave was taken back to Virginia.
A good reference for this information and a much more detailed version of what happened in that Massachusetts case is Stanley W. Campbell's excellent book, "The Slave Catchers, Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860," copyright 1968 and 1970.
Benjamin R. Curtis was one of the two judges in Boston who handled the 1855 trial of some of the 1854 protestors. The judges voided the indictment against the protestors. As far as I know, the protestors were not punished.
Fascinating. Even after all of these years, the demonrats have remained very close to their roots.
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