16. Why did Southern plantation owners favor the Dred Scott decision?

In sharp contrast to the Northern reaction, Southerners universally lauded the decision issued in the Supreme Court case of Scott v. Sandford. They saw it as the ultimate vindication of their practice of slavery, and as the front page of the Daily Morning News of Savannah, Georgia, proclaimed, "the series of decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case, is of more vital importance in reference to the settlement of the slavery question than any or all the other acts and proceedings upon this subject - legislative and judicial, State or Federal - since the organization of the Federal Government."[38] The idea that the Dred Scott decision provided the answer to the slavery question seemed to take hold in the South as almost all Southern responses to the decision made reference to it. As an article from the Richmond Enquirerasserted, "A prize, for which the athletes of the nation have often wrestled in the halls of Congress, has been awarded at last, by the proper umpire, to those who have justly won it. The nation has achieved a triumph, sectionalism has been rebuked, and abolitionism has been staggered and stunned."[39] Southerners also believed that since this Supreme Court decision had solved the slavery question, there would no longer be any reason for sectional tension between the North and South.