Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) was the Supreme Court's most important decision in the years leading up to the Civil War. Jurisprudentially the decision had relatively little long-term impact. However its short-term political impact was enormous. It generated hundreds of newspaper editorials and countless speeches by politicians. In 1858 two senatorial candidates in Illinois—the incumbent Stephen A. Douglas and the challenger Abraham Lincoln—vigorously analyzed the case, as well as the issue of extending slavery into the territories, in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. In 1860 Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune and the most important Republican journalist, published a pamphlet edition of the majority opinion of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (1777–1864) and the dissent of Associate Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis. Predominantly antislavery, the Republicans distributed tens of thousands of copies of...