and despise this edict of Taney,” Douglass told a New York audience in May 1857. “Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good evil.”[70]
As part of his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1858, Abraham Lincoln decried the Dred Scott decision, calling it “erroneous” as a matter of law and warning that it would lead to “the spread of the black man’s bondage.”[71] In his first inaugural address in March 1861, Lincoln continued his criticism of the Court, suggesting that such judicial overreach as the Dred Scott decision—which he did not mention by name—threatened democracy:
[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.[72]
Following the secession of the eleven states that formed the Confederacy between December 1860 and May 1861, the Republican-controlled Congress set about reshaping the federal judiciary as “a partner against the South.”[73] Many contemporaries also hoped that these efforts would redeem the Court from the stain of the Dred Scott decision.
The start of the Civil War witnessed a series of reforms to the circuit courts. In his first message to Congress in 1861, President Lincoln observed that “the country has outgrown our present judicial system” and called for the circuit system to be overhauled.[74] Eight states that had been admitted over the past two decades had never had circuit courts visited by a Supreme Court Justice. Yet Lincoln did not advocate expanding the size of the Court. Instead, he urged that Congress sever the connection between the Court and the circuits, setting the size of the Court at a “convenient number” and then establishing circuits of “convenient size,” with circuit-judging duties to be handled by some combination of Justices and circuit judges.[75]
Congress enacted some of Lincoln’s recommended reforms. In 1862 and 1863, enabled by the exodus of southern Democrats from the federal government, Congress reorganized the circuits in order to limit southern influence. Instead of five circuits composed entirely of slaveholding states, there were now only three such circuits. The total number of circuits was now ten, and a tenth seat was added to the Court. As in the eighteenth century, when the Court had comprised six seats, reformers appeared unbothered by the prospect of an even number of
