Just read - no comments needed

[David Lockmiller]

(06-21-2018 05:00 PM)L Verge Wrote:  So far as I can tell, David, all you did was quote from Goodwin's Team of Rivals, and she in turn quotes another author. Both of them do the same as you - put the onus on Taney alone.

"Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era" is a Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the American Civil War, published in 1988, by James M. McPherson. In 2003, in his book "The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era," McPherson wrote the following paragraph at pages 136-137:

Taney's opinion took up first the question whether Dred Scott, as a black man, was a citizen with the right to sue in federal courts. Taney devoted more space to this matter than anything else. Why he did so is puzzling, for in the public mind this was the least important issue in the case. But the southern whites viewed free blacks as an anomaly and a threat to the stability of slavery; Taney's own state of Maryland contained the largest free Negro population of any state. The chief justices's apparent purpose in negating U. S. citizenship for blacks, wrote Fehrenbacher, was "to launch a sweeping counterattack on the antislavery movement and . . . to meet every threat to southern stability by separating the Negro race absolutely from the federal Constitution and all the rights that it bestowed." To do so, however, he had to juggle history, law, and logic in "a gross perversion of the facts." Negroes had not been part of the "sovereign people" who made the Constitution, Taney ruled; they were not included in the "all men" whom the Declaration of Independence proclaimed "created equal." After all, the author of that Declaration and many of the signers owned slaves, and for them to have regarded members of the enslaved race as potential citizens would have been "utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted." For that matter, wrote Taney, at the time the Constitution was adopted Negroes "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order . . . so far inferior, that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect."