1857 DRED SCOTT. State of Maine Defies Supreme Court and Grants Freedom All Slaves. Rare.

A very rare publication containing the official Thirty-Sixth Legislature of Maine's hard pass and open legislative rebuke to the United States Supreme Court's landmark Dred Scott v. Sandford decision rendered in March of that same year. In the Dred Scott ruling, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that African Americans were not and could never be U.S. citizens, that Congress lacked the authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories, and that slave owners maintained constitutional property rights over enslaved people across the nation.

Printed and distributed as a newspaper "Extra," this publication served to immediately inform the public of Maine's legal defiance against the high court's expansion of slaveholding power.

The significance of these public laws lies in how Maine mobilized state sovereignty to nullify the local enforcement and ideological reach of the Dred Scott decision. Among the key measures included in the 1857 session were expanded Personal Liberty Laws and explicit statutes declaring that any enslaved person brought into Maine by their master would automatically become free. Furthermore, Maine reaffirmed that Black residents within its borders retained full state citizenship and legal rights, directly contradicting Taney’s assertion that Black Americans possessed "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." By publishing these laws, Maine joined several Northern states in legally shielding free Black citizens and runaway slaves, erecting state-level statutory barriers against the federal nationalization of slavery and cementing Northern resistance in the lead-up to the 1860 election.

No examples traced at auction. 

[Dred Scott, Fugitive Slaves, Emancipation] The Democrat . . . Extra. Public Laws of the State of Maine, Passed by the Thirty-Sixth Legislature, A. D. 1857. 8pp. 

Very good, clean with some minor softening to paper and text at folds.