Just read - no comments needed

[David Lockmiller]

(06-22-2018 03:44 AM)My Name Is Kate Wrote:  As regards post #68 above, IMO, Taney was stating historical facts, not his own personal opinion. It supports the view that his decision in the Dred Scott ruling was intended to uphold the Constitution, and was not just an interpretation of what the Founding Fathers intended.

[T]he main theme of his twenty-eight-year tenure on the Court was the defense of slavery. Taney had no great love of the institution for its own sake, having freed his own slaves. But he did have a passionate commitment "to southern life and values, which seemed organically linked to the peculiar institution and unpreservable without it." In private letters, Taney expressed growing anger at "northern aggression." "Our own southern countrymen" were in great danger, he wrote; "the knife of the assassin is at their throats." Taney's southern colleagues on the Court shared this apprehension, according to historian Don Fehrenbacher; Justice Peter Daniel of Virginia was "a brooding proslavery fanatic" and the other three were "unreserved defenders of slavery." Because of this "emotional commitment so intense that it made perception and logic utterly subservient," the Dred Scott decision was "essentially visceral in origin . . . a work of unmitigated partisanship, polemical in spirit [with an] extraordinary cumulation of error, inconsistency, and misrepresentation." ("The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era," page 136)

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."

This was false, as Curtis and McLean pointed out in their dissents. Free blacks in 1788 and later had many legal rights (to hold and bequeath property, make contracts, seek redress in the courts, among others). In five of the thirteen states that ratified the Constitution black men were legal voters and participated in the ratification process. No matter, said Taney, these were rights of state citizenship and the question at issue was United States citizenship. A person might "have all of the rights and privileges of the citizen of a State," opined the chief justice, and "yet not entitled to the rights and privileges of a citizen in any other State" -- a piece of judicial legerdemain that contradicted the Article IV, Section 2, of the Constitution: "The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states." ("The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era," page 137)