Each judge was assigned a circuit and spent several weeks a year trying cases at each court within the circuit. And as @jbouie pointed out, the 1837 expansion of the Court happened in large part because there was a need for new circuits to account for new states in the union. /5
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No one at the time would have called this "packing" nor would they have conceived of it this way. And the implication that adding justices was a way to shore up slavery is a wild misreading of the past and the context in which Congress changed the shape of the Court. /6
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A second problem in what
@baseballcrank is arguing is an assumption that Americans have always conceived of the Court in the same way that they do today. /71 reply 1 retweet 17 likesShow this thread -
But the federal courts did not have the same kind of power or prestige we give the Supreme Court in the 21st century. There was not the same adherence to a hierarchy of the judicial system as we know from great work by Laura Edwards,
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Replying to @rachelshelden @arielagross
Thanks for the mention. And, yes, when we dig in we find that Dred Scott, as heinous as Justice Taney’s ideas certainly were, they mostly failed because of widespread resistance to the decision.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/07/06/how-to-resist-bad-supreme-court-rulings/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.442ef958a9b0 …
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Yes. It was a vicious cycle: Taney tried to take an issue away from the voters without a basis in the text; his decision galvanized resistance; that resistance in turn alarmed the South. Both sides radicalized, the South bolted, leading to war.
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Dred Scott was clearly a contributing factor in the sectional conflict, but this is an awfully simplistic way of explaining the Civil War. There was not a one-to-one cause and effect here.
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Replying to @rachelshelden @baseballcrank and
The biggest complaint that most white Northerners had about the decision was the element relating to Congress's right to legislate for the territories. And congressmen from both sections simply *ignored* that part of the decision in trying to create a compromise in 1860/61.
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The status of the territories was the central battleground of the 1850s, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Kansas-Nebraska Act fight, and Bleeding Kansas. It was Southern fear of Lincoln's stance on the territories that was central to secession.
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Indeed. But you didn't need the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott to make it an issue -- it already was one. Republicans absolutely used the decision to create political support but Taney's decision was not the trigger for conflict on that issue.
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I don't think you need to treat Dred Scott as somehow the sole cause of the war (it wasn't) to see it as a dangerous, prominent & significant step down that path & one that we should be very hesitant to repeat.
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Of course: Dred Scott was a dangerous and evil decision that contributed to the war. The problem here is trying to tell a story with a straight line from reshaping the Court in the 1830s to Dred Scott to the Civil War.
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