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Political Atheism: Dred Scott , Roger Brooke Taney, and Orestes A. Brownson

2002; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2002.0072

1534-0708

Patrick W. Carey,

Mormonism, Religion, and History

The Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision in early March of 1857 inflamed the national debate over slavery and deepened the divide that led ultimately to the Civil War. The decision has been analyzed repeatedly by historians and legal scholars, and has created divergent opinions on what was legally decided and what was merely obiter dictum, and on whether the case was influenced more by politics than by law. 1 Many historians claim that the decision destroyed the Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney's (1777-1864) 2 reputation as a legal scholar and [End Page 207] weakened the authority of the Supreme Court in its immediate aftermath. Little noticed in the literature on the case is the debate that took place in the American Catholic community after the decision. Contemporaries and historians alike at times called attention to the fact that Taney was a Maryland Catholic, and some anti-Catholic religious newspaper editors in the North singled out his religious identification as one of the reasons for his ex cathedra decision in favor of slavery. On the whole, though, few contemporaries or historians paid any attention to the divergent American Catholic reactions to the decision, nor to the debate among Catholic journalists and newspaper editors on the wider issue of the relationship of religion and politics that the decision triggered in the Catholic community. This paper focuses upon the religious issue that some Catholics saw in Dred Scott.