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What was the impact of the Dred Scott decision?

The Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford greatly enflamed sectional tensions between the North and the South. By declaring that Dred Scott was not entitled to his freedom, even though he had lived in Wisconsin territory for a time, the Court basically invalidated the Missouri Compromise, which declared territories north of the 36'30 line closed to slavery. This decision thus outraged many Northerners, who were convinced that a "slave power" conspired to spread the institution throughout the nation despite the opposition of the North. (A majority of the Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Roger Taney, was pro-slavery.) It even threatened the doctrine of "popular sovereignty" proposed by Northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas as a solution to the issue of the expansion of slavery. Southerners no longer saw this as a valid political position, and rejected Douglas when he attempted to make it part of the Democratic Party platform in the presidential election of 1860. Most importantly, it greatly added to the popularity of the Republican Party in northern states. The Republicans were devoted to stopping the spread of slavery, and when their candidate Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, largely because of the split in the Democratic Party mentioned above, the states of the Deep South, led by South Carolina, seceded from the Union. So the decision exacerbated tensions between North and South and made compromise over the issue of slavery far less likely.

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