434 The Dred Scott case. [i857 had been entered into by Great Britain and the United States, a treaty known in the United States as the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, because negotiated by John M. Clayton, President Taylor's Secretary of State, and Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, the British Minister. In 1854 trade had obtained the advantage of a reciprocity treaty with Great Britain, by which important rights were given and taken in respect of commerce with the British possessions in North America and the fisheries of New England and Nova Scotia ; as well as of a treaty with Japan, negotiated by Commodore Perry, which secured a beginning, at any rate, of commercial intercourse between that country and the United States. But no growth of population or facilitation of trade could keep pace with the artificial work of speculation. The bubbles of fatuous enterprise were pricked, and a crisis of wholesale loss, panic, and depression occurred in spite of every token of trade and profit to come. Congress did what it could to relieve the distress. It was feared that the high tariff rates then prevailing were drawing too much of the money needed by the banks into the Treasury of the United States; and a modification of the tariff laws was promptly effected, in the short session of Congress which followed the elections of 1856. Party interests no longer centred in financial questions: slavery had drawn passion off, and the congressional leaders co-operated with singular temperateness and sobriety in a modification of the law. Many of the raw materials of manufacture were put on the free list, and the duty on protected articles was reduced to twenty-four per cent. That was all that the government could do. The crisis could not be prevented. Throughout the year trade and industry were at a hopeless standstill : the autumn brought no revival. There was nothing for it but to wait for a slow and painful recuperation. Even in the presence of almost universal pecuniary distress or anxiety, politics seemed inevitably to take precedence of every private concern. President Buchanan's inauguration occurred in the very midst of the troubled times in Kansas, when the struggle there still hung in a doubtful balance; and he had been in office but a few days when the Supreme Court of the United States pronounced a decision which added a new and deeply significant element both to the importance and to the excitement of the contest in the unhappy Territory. This was its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott was a negro slave whose master, an army surgeon, had carried him for a brief period of residence first into the State of Illinois, where slavery was illegal, and then to a military post situated in the public domain further to the westward from which slavery had been excluded by the Com- promise legislation of 1820 ; afterwards returning with him to Missouri, his home. The negro claimed that his residence in the free State of Illinois had operated to destroy his master's right over him ; and the case instituted in his behalf before the Courts had come at this critical
