Читать книгу American Civil War For Dummies - Keith D. Dickson - Страница 53

The Dred Scott decision was a disaster for the South. Rather than protecting slavery, it brought many Northerners to the Republican Party, who now saw the party as the only bulwark against a Southern legal and political conspiracy to open the entire nation to slavery. The Court’s decision also unwittingly dealt a deathblow to the Democratic Party’s chances to maintain an intersectional political organization. Stephen Douglas’s popular sovereignty, whatever its merits, was the one issue that brought Northern and Southern Democrats together. It had allowed the party to win the presidency in 1856. Now that the Dred Scott decision declared popular sovereignty invalid, the party had no hope of winning the 1860 presidential election against a united and powerful Republican Party.