The Supreme Court as an issue of the election of 1860

To properly evaluate the Supreme Court as an issue in the Presidential election of 1860, it is necessary to consider three different phases of the question. As a background for the subject, it is well to gain a clear conception of the different views of the two sections of the country toward slavery at the time of the adoption of the Constitution as well is the development of the antagonism between the North and South during the succeeding years. With respect to the period immediately preceding the election, a careful survey should be made of the shifting attitudes of the political parties toward the Supreme Court especially between 1848 and 1860, the defiance of the states toward the Supreme Court decisions, and the final plunging of that tribunal into politics when it made its decision in the Dred Scott case. As a third phase of the subject, and one to which most space is given in this thesis, it is necessary to examine the effects of the decision in arousing the Republican party to its greatest hostility to the Court, and in causing a break in the Democratic party which virtually made way for the election of the Republican nominee, Abraham Lincoln.