The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, just weeks before a presidential election, is a scenario out of nightmares. But in many ways, it only dramatizes a fundamental problem that has faced the country for years: the likelihood that the Supreme Court, dominated by extremely conservative justices for decades to come, will act as the far right’s major bulwark against democratic reform.

Faced with this prospect — and stung by the ruthlessness with which leading Republicans have pursued it — many liberals have come to support major judicial reforms, most of them modeled on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to expand the court in the 1930s. Yet in some ways, the emphasis on FDR’s “court-packing” idea obscures a historical moment when progressives mounted an even more radical challenge to judicial supremacy: the antislavery struggle of the Civil War era.

In 1857, a Southern-majority Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Scott had no legal right to bring suit in federal court — that, in Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s famous words, colonial and US history showed that black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”