A Sublimity of Impudence

Becoming Lincoln

The Scott family's decade-long fight to claim the freedom owed to them under the law ran into state and federal judges determined to close the courts -- and broader citizenship -- to Black Americans. For white Americans like Abraham Lincoln, the Dred Scott ruling forced them to consider how denial of rights to one group of people could leave everyone else's rights open to question.
 
 Sources used:
 
 Blumenthal, Sidney: All The Powers of Earth. Simon and Schuster, 2019.
 
 Burlingame, Michael, Abraham Lincoln: A Life. (Vol. 1). The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. 1953 Edition hosted by the University of Michigan.

Davis, Rodney and Wilson, Douglas, ed. Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln. University of Chicago Press, 1998.
 
Davis, Rodney and Wilson, Douglas, ed. Herndon on Lincoln: Letters. Knox College Lincoln Studies Center, 2016.

Donald, David Herbert, Lincoln: A Biography. Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Donald, David Herbert, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. Alfred A. Knopf, 1960.
 
 "Dred Scott." The New York Times, Sept. 21, 1858, p. 4.
 
 Finkelman, Paul, Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford Books; 1997.

Foner, Eric, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. W.W. Norton and Company, 2011.
 
Quitt, Martin H. Stephen A. Douglas and Antebellum Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
 
 Ripley, C. Peter, ed. Witness For Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery and Emancipation. The University of North Carolina Press, 1993. 

Wilentz, Sean, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. W.W. Norton and Company, 2005.

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