This according to Wikipedia:
"In the 1770s, blacks throughout New England began sending petitions to northern legislatures demanding freedom. Five of the Northern self-declared states adopted policies to at least gradually abolish slavery: Pennsylvania (1780), New Hampshire and Massachusetts (1783), Connecticut and Rhode Island (1784). Vermont had abolished slavery in 1777, while it was still independent, and when it joined the United States as the 14th state in 1791, it was the first state to join untainted by slavery."
So the concept of blacks, even in the North, having rights anything close to whites (or even as anything other than slaves), was very new at the time the Constitution was written (1787). I don't see that what Taney stated in his Dred Scott quote is contradicted by historical facts.
As for Article IV, Section 2, of the Constitution, I don't see that it is relevant to this discussion because it refers to citizens, not slaves.
When states in the North began individually and separately making slavery illegal prior to the Civil War, did it mean blacks in those states were then citizens, or just no longer slaves?
http://www.genealogytoday.com/genealogy/...nship.html
This statement in post #72 below sounds like revisionist history to me:
"In five of the thirteen states that ratified the Constitution black men were legal voters and participated in the ratification process."
