In this day and age, newspapers rarely print fiction. Of course, there is the occasional magical story written by a third grade class that appears every once a week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper, but for the most part, fictional stories of real substance are not published in newspapers anymore. This was not the case in the 1800's. Appearing in The Valley Star each week was...
The Dred Scott decision of March 6, 1857, brought to a head the tension surrounding the issue of slavery in the United States.In the case, the Supreme Court ruled that Scott was still a slave, and therefore, and no right to file suit in a United States court as he was not a citizen and did not have the rights of such.The Enquirer, a Democratic newspaper, greeted this decision with great applause.The...
In the Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the opinion of the court, concluding that people of African decent, whether or not they were bound by slavery or free, could never become citizens of the United States and furthermore, that Congress had no right to create or administer territories. It was also the opinion of the Court that the Constitution could...
Dred Scott was a slave living in Missouri. Between the years of 1833 and 1843 Scott lived in Illinois (a free state) and a part of the Louisiana Territory that barred slavery under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. When he returned home to Missouri, Scott claimed that after living in a free state he had become a free man and was no longer a slave. Scott's master, Mr. John F. A. Sanford, claimed...
Passed with some hope to elude the impending economic crisis, the Tariff of 1857 was the lowest tariff enacted by Congress since 1816. The tariff was partially passed in order to rectify the conflict between the woolen manufacturers and producers, both of whom were badly hit with the 1846 tariff, which had raised the duties on raw wools to thirty percent and reduced that on flannels and blankets...
After one day of debate on the Senate floor, the Hunter Amendment, named after Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, was passed by a vote of 32-12. The Hunter Amendment to the Tariff of 1857 included a reduction in all tariff schedules by twenty to twenty-five percent. Hunter's bill, which reduced the duty on iron from thirty to twenty-four percent, caused iron manufacturers in Pennsylvania to...
On March 26, 1857, William Ellison wrote to his son Henry Ellison about the family business. Life was going well and Ellison wanted to update his son on how things were going at home. John, one of Ellison’s 53 slaves had just been to the river to collect payment from a number of white slaveowners for the cotton gins they had purchased from Mr. Ellison. He came back with no money at the end of...
Relations between people from each side of the divide between slave and free states proved to be contentious in the years preceding the Civil War. On September 19, 1856, the Chicago Tribune reported a peculiar incident involving a Northerner who had made his way South. The captain of ship from Maine docked his ship in the port at Alexandria, Virginia. Upon hearing the results of the election...
A New Orleans newspaper editor published news of “slave disturbances' throughout the South. The Times Picayune of New Orleans, Louisiana reported, “the increased discontents have as often shown that a remedy has not been reached;it is not to be disguised that violent offenses, breaches of the peace, and homicides have multiplied, especially of late;' Other reports from various...
The United States Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, but there were some who still took part in the slave trade, knowing it was illegal. Some southerners even talked about reviving the slave trade in the mid-1850s, but most Americans opposed this idea, and numerous slave smugglers were put on trial in the United States. According to the New York Herald, "the United States...