Of course, the Dred Scott case itself was a consequence of the crisis as well as a cause for increasing it. Douglas was the author of the popular-sovereignty doctrine in the Senate that had led to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and he would have been challenged by the Republicans over slavery precisely on that score. But what matters here is that the Dred Scott case gave the issue a popular immediacy that it would not have otherwise had. On this basis, it would seem very possible that, without Dred Scott (which was more immediate than the Kansas-Nebraska Act), Abraham Lincoln would not have been elected president in .199 The secession of the southern States would seem to be the direct consequence of Lincoln’s election.200 Secession was the immediate cause of the Civil War, whether one believes the war was fought over State sovereignty or for or against slavery. Probably one should not separate the issues.201 One need take only one element, Story’s theory of comity, out of the causation equation and replace it with Huber’s theory to realize that we do not know what the course of American history would otherwise have been. Tensions would, of course, have existed between slave States and free States, and they would have had to be resolved in some way at some time; almost certainly with violence. Let us even suppose that, given all the other circumstances, a civil war would have been inevitable. For the South to have won, it need only not have lost. Its victory did not require the conquest of the North. But the conquest of the South was a mammoth task, and some northern generals showed a corresponding reluctance to undertake it, especially in the early days of the war. Without Lincoln’s astonishing fervor to 199 On the election campaign see, e.g., McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 223ff. 200See the history of events in McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 234ff. 201 On the issues see, e.g., W.M. Wiececk, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Ithaca, 1977); H.M. Hyman and W.M. Wiececk, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development (New York, 1982).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=