| While scholars have examined the role of southern agitators and the United States Congress in the demise of Reconstruction, they have largely neglected the part played by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court. This dissertation investigates the Supreme Court's decisions relating to freedmen in the post-Civil War era, concentrating on the three principal channels through which civil rights could be protected: the national government, the jury box, and the voting booth. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 held that blacks could never be United States citizens. Thereafter, Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party nominated fourteen consecutive appointees to the Supreme Court between 1862 and 1882, making it possible a new majority of the bench to reverse Dred Scott, grant citizenship to four million ex-slaves, and support the civil rights of all Americans. Yet in decision after decision, the Republican justices did little to assist freedmen. Instead, they seemed determined, for conservative political or very narrow legal reasons, to maintain states' rights and existing legal procedures against the changes implicit in the three pivotal constitutional amendments passed during Reconstruction: the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Chief Justice Taney's Dred Scott decision thrust the Court onto center stage of the American political arena; four of the five justices appointed by President Abraham Lincoln further politicized the judicial branch by running for president from the bench. At a time when politics bedeviled America, the Supreme Court justices demonstrated extreme sensitivity to public opinion and partisan pressures, resulting in regular setbacks for civil rights, especially in the 1873--1880 period. They wrote a handful of decisions supporting freedmen, but mostly only when sitting in circuit courts during the period when radials controlled Congress. Curiously, the justices tried to resuscitate the values and mission of Reconstruction, in one or two jury cases in 1880 and a similar number of voting rights cases just afterwards, but their opinions ultimately generated circumstances unfavorable to blacks. In the end, the Supreme Court opened the door to the horrors of Jim Crow. By focusing on about twenty Supreme Court race cases relating to civil, political, and social rights---from the Dred Scott Case of 1857 to the 1883 Civil Rights Cases---this dissertation reveals that the Republican justices did very little to advance the cause of African Americans. Instead, they negotiated the surrender of Reconstruction.*;*A list and synopsis of all the cases under consideration may be found in Appendix One. Several of these cases were significant at the circuit and Supreme Court level and had salience regarding more than one pivotal issue of Reconstruction; as such, they are considered from more than one perspective in more than one of the following chapters. |
