Just read - no comments needed

[David Lockmiller]

(06-23-2018 10:48 AM)My Name Is Kate Wrote:  I am not aware that the U.S. Constitution originally made any statements about race. It does mention slaves, at least twice, but does not mention race, AFAIK. Where Taney gets the idea that black people could not ever become citizens of the United States, is beyond me.

I think that the Pulitzer-Prize winning author and historian James M. McPherson (for his 1988 book Battle Cry of Freedom - The Civil War Era) and the renowned Lincoln historian and Stanford University Professor Don Fehrenbacher were in agreement regarding the purpose of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Taney in writing his majority Dred Scott opinion. I just discovered this morning in Googling Professor Fehrenbacher that he won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. [There appears to be a bit more material on the Dred Scott decision that neither of us have read.]

The following is from my post #68:

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."

P.S. I do not know what "AFAIK" stands for.