Two Miserable Presidents Read Online Free

dirt.
    When the bodies were found the next morning, it was the South’s turn to be furious. “WAR! WAR!” declared a Missouri newspaper. A pro-slavery paper in Kansas called the killings an “abolitionist outrage” and demanded immediate revenge.
    Pro-slavery forces went on the attack, burning Free-Soilers’ cabins, stealing their horses, and searching for John Brown. Free-Soil armies struck back, and all-out war erupted in Kansas—or as newspapers now called it, “Bleeding Kansas.”
    More than two hundred men were killed in Kansas in 1856. And the issue of slavery was still far from settled.
    Dred Scott Denied
    M eanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., the Supreme Court was about to give the North and South something else to fight about.
    Here are the facts of the case: A black man named Dred Scott was enslaved, owned by a white army surgeon from Missouri, Dr. John Emerson. In the 1830s Emerson had taken Scott with him to a few army bases in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory—areas where slavery was illegal. In 1846 Scott had sued for his freedom from John Emerson’s wife, Irene (John had recently died). Scott told the judge that he had lived for years in a free state and free territory, and therefore he should be free:

    â€œBelieving that under this state of fact, that he is entitled to his freedom, he prays your honor to allow him to sue said Irene Emerson in said Court, in order to establish his right to freedom.”

    After more than ten years in court, Scott’s case reached the United States Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland was a proud defender of the South and saw this as his big chance to strike a blow for Southern rights. (Maybe his last chance: he was eighty.)
    Dred Scott
    In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott was still a slave. Why? Because blacks were not citizens of the United States, wrote Chief Justice Taney, and they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In other words, Scott had no right to bring his case to court in the first place.
    But since he had, Taney went on to rule that there should be no free territory, because Congress has no right to ban slavery in territories. Slaves are property, Taney said, and the government cannot tell citizens where they can and cannot take their property.
    Southern slave owners cheered that their rights had finally been protected. But opponents of slavery were shocked—and scared too. What next? Would the Supreme Court rule that slavery was legal everywhere in the United States?
    Senator Lincoln?
    A braham Lincoln was one of many Northerners upset by the Dred Scott decision. To Lincoln, the Court’s decision demonstrated that supporters of slavery had too much power in the national government. He planned to help change that. “I have really got it into my head to try to be United States Senator,” he told friends.
    His wife, Mary, agreed that Abe could be a senator—she only wished he would act like one. Lincoln had the embarrassing habit of answering their front door in his slippers. And he wore baggy, sloppy clothes, and a tall black hat in which he kept notes and letters. One day some kids knocked off Lincoln’s hat and his important papers fell out and scattered all over the sidewalk. As Lincoln calmly bent down to gather the papers, the laughing kids jumped onto his back.
    That was Lincoln—he just wasn’t a fancy guy. Born in a tiny log cabin in Kentucky in 1809, Lincoln had spent only about a year in
school. He made up for this by reading every book he could get his hands on. He even stuck books in his pockets before going out to the field to plow. As twelve-year-old Abe explained: “The things I want to know are in books. My best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.”
    The Lincoln family moved west to Indiana, and then on to Illinois. By the time Abe turned eighteen, he was six feet four