The Dred Scott decision embodied how the debates over slavery held unique potential to deepen Americans’ awareness of historical distance. In his decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney accepted the historical grounds of debate that had been prepared through decades of interpretive emphasis on the historical explication. He then argued that because the founders had not considered blacks as citizens in 1787, blacks could not be citizens in 1857. In this reading, Taney forcefully rejected the antislavery idea that the progress of moral insight demanded new constitutional readings. However, in their dissenting opinions, John McLean and Benjamin Curtis gave official credence to much of that antislavery idea. They suggested that the Constitution could be adapted in light of original expectations of abolition. These opinions, along with political and popular responses to the decision, accelerated a growing sense that more than just chronological difference separated nineteenth-century Americans from their revolutionary predecessors. In their appeals to the founding era, the justices and their respondents highlighted unmistakable historical differences between that past and their present.

New Orleans authorities accused William H. Williams of violating a Louisiana state law of 1817 against the importation of convict slaves. Williams, as it turned out, had a long history in the courtroom. Although his business practices helped him largely avoid redhibition suits, and he was never charged with slave stealing or kidnapping as were some of his slave–dealing counterparts, he did face multiple suits lodged by free blacks who claimed that they were unlawfully imprisoned in the Yellow House, Williams’ slave jail.