Reverdy Johnson was born in Annapolis, Maryland on May, 21, 1796. Johnson, although personally opposed to slavery, was the attorney who represented the slave owner in the Dred Scott case.

United States Reports is a series of bound case reporters that are the official reports of decisions for the United States Supreme Court.

Caleb Cushing, who had served as attorney general under President Franklin Pierce, represented a minority voice raised in the North in support of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's Dred Scott opinion. In a major speech in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in October 1857, Cushing defended Taney as "the very incarnation of judicial purity, integrity, science and wisdom." Grateful for this support, Taney thanked Cushing in this letter of November 9, 1857, indicating that the "public mind" was not "in a condition to listen to reason" and noting that "wild passions ruled the hour."