American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 8

Part 8 of a Series

Two Americas, 1860

“And the war came.”

- Abraham Lincoln

In a series focused on America’s four defining documents, it may seem odd to spend so much time on the contrasting views of Frederick Douglass and Roger Taney. But the 1850s ended with the Civil War, which was then, and remains today, the fundamental challenge, not just to the  legacy of American Exceptionalism, but to the survival of the nation itself. Douglass and Taney confronted the country’s elemental paradox: that we are a land of liberty built on a foundation of slavery. They read the same texts and admired the same authors. Both even argued that the founding fathers were great men and brave men who must be taken at their word. Yet they laid out two visions of American and its “peculiar institution” that were polar opposites.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the founders had declared, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That is so, said Frederick Douglass. Therefore, the slave must be a free man.

That is so, said Roger Taney. Therefore, the slave cannot be a man.

On one thing, though, Douglass and Taney agreed: there could be no compromise on this issue.

“The right of property in a slave,” wrote Taney, “is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”

“It is not light that is needed,” said Douglass, “but fire.”

The Civil War nullified the Dred Scott decision, and the post war government quickly overturned it. The 13th amendment (1865) abolished slavery; the 14th amendment(1868) declared that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States;” and the 15th amendment guaranteed the right to vote to all citizens, regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

But Dred Scott’s most enduring legacy has proved far more difficult to overcome. For the decision is rooted in a doctrine of Black inferiority that continues to be embedded in far too much of our culture. Taney’s racism is overt, unapologetic, and pervasive. The Civil War and the new amendments could end slavery, make Black people citizens, and, at least theoretically, give them the right to vote. But no constitutional amendment could ever undo the damage of a decision that not only extolled slavery but wrote systemic racism into the Constitution itself.

In the end, Frederick Douglass left the most important legacy of all. As outsiders have done so often throughout our history – and as Martin Luther King, Jr. would do over a century later below the Lincoln Memorial – Douglass grounded his fiery condemnation of America firmly in America’s own principles. The Constitution, he argued, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted . . . is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”

The Dred Scott decision called forth America’s most reprehensible demons. Frederick Douglass appealed to what Abraham Lincoln would later call “the better angels of our nature.”

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 7

Part 7 of a Series

Washington, D.C., 1857

“The Constitution of the United States recognizes slaves as property.”

- Roger B. Taney

We ended last time with Frederick Douglass’ syllogism on slavery:

  • Every person thinks slavery is wrong for them.

  • A slave is a person.

  • Therefore, slavery is wrong for every person and must be abolished.

Enter, three years later, Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the United States, with a syllogism of his own:

  • The Constitution protects a private property.

  • A slave is not a person but an article of private property.

  • Therefore, the Constitution protects, not the slave’s non-existent person, but the slaveowner’s property.

The case was Dred Scott v. Sandford. The plaintiff was an enslaved Black man who had been owned, bought, and sold for his entire life. Because he had lived for a time in a free state (Illinois) and a free territory (which later became the state of Wisconsin), Scott argued that he had in the process become a free man. He sued for his and his family’s freedom, and after years of legal meandering, including decisions in his favor, the case arrived at the Supreme Court.

The result was not just a fatal blow to the hopes of Dred Scott and his family, it was a disaster for all Black Americans and, indeed, for the whole nation.. Having proclaimed that a slave was not a man but another’s man’s property, Taney went on to declare that not only current slaves, but all descendants of slaves, were not persons before the law. “No one of that race had ever migrated to the United States voluntarily,” he wrote erroneously; “all of them had been brought here as articles of merchandise.” Consequently, no Black person, “whether they had become free or not,” can be a citizen of the United States or the state in which they reside.

For good measure, the court’s majority declared null and void any law that sought to limit a slaveholder’s absolute control over his property. It upheld the Fugitive Slave Law, which required that all escaped slaves be returned to their enslavers, regardless of where they had been captured. And it asserted that the Fifth Amendment – one so many people are pleading in Washington these days – forbids, in addition to self-incrimination, taking a person’s “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Since slaves were property, Congress had no authority to limit slavery anywhere in the United States, including in its territories. In the opinion of this court, the sanctity of property was in no way modified by the fact that the article of merchandise happened to be physically, if not legally, a person.

Hailed by the Southern States, the Court’s 7-2 decision led directly to the Civil War three years later. Since then, Dred Scott v. Sandford has been widely considered the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court. Recently, conservatives have disparaged it for legislating from the bench, in their eyes, the worst judicial sin of all.

But Taney does no such thing. Rather, he grounds his thinking firmly in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and he notes that, although popular opinion on the slavery issue may have become more liberal over time, that is not a matter for the court. “The Constitution,” he wrote, “must be construed now as it was understood at the time of its adoption. Any other rule of construction would abrogate the judicial character of this court and make it the mere reflex of the popular opinion or passion of the day.”

If such reasoning sounds familiar, it should. For it’s precisely the narrow, strict-constructionist position favored by the current majority on today’s Supreme Court.

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 6

On July 5th, 1852, 76 years and one day after the American colonies had declared independence, Frederick Douglass delivered a stinging rebuke to all the self-congratulatory speeches on all the flag-draped podiums that had just taken place across the country. In an invited speech in Rochester, N.Y., he asked the members of the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”.

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American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 4

“My dad always flew the American flag.” So begins “Democracy”, the first chapter of The 1619 Project by Nicole Hannah-Jones. “When I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me,” she continues. “That my dad felt so much honor in being an American struck me as a marker of his degradation, of his acceptance of our subordination.”

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American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 2

Critics dismiss the idea of American Exceptionalism as arrogant and dangerous nonsense about a nation whose history is rife with terrible contradictions: the extermination of native peoples in the land of opportunity; the enslavement of a fifth of its population in the cradle of liberty; the denial of the vote to half its people in the citadel of democracy.

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American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery

One day in the late spring of 1630, on the deck of a three-masted, 350-ton ship somewhere in the North Atlantic, John Winthrop set forth his vision for the community he and his Puritan congregation would build in New England. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” he told his 300 fellow passengers toward the end of his long sermon. “The eyes of all people are upon us.” And so, even before the Arbella had anchored off what would become Boston, Massachusetts, and 146 years before independence had been declared, American Exceptionalism was born.

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Thank You

I wrote my first Perspective(“Haiti”) on January 2, 2012. Initially, the blogs were limited to 250 words and were published five (and sometimes six) times a week. Their intent was to present a modest thought, one that connected my personal world to the much larger world beyond, in the hope of stimulating us (you and me) to think a little differently – to consider something from a new perspective.

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The Great Newtonian-Einsteinian Gravity Conspiracy

The reason I mention this at all is that one of the historical consequences of the Newtonian-Einsteinian gravity conspiracy has been to consign to the dustbin of history the equally important – and now lamentably forgotten – counterforce of levity. I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but it certainly has been effective – and I see its impact every morning when I find my inbox filled with messages from candidates, PACs, and untold others in the political business, each one angrier, gloomier, at once more desperate and more negative than the last. To say there is no levity here, no humor, and not a hint of whimsy to start my day would be a huge understatement.

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“A republic if you can keep it.”*

An unprecedented callousness has crept into our public discourse, and in the land of me first, the other no longer seems to matter. Bullies are not to be confronted but emulated. Lies are not to be exposed but repeated until they have become indistinguishable from the truth. And only a sucker says I’m sorry.

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Confronting the Past and Building the Future in Montgomery, Alabama

My daughter, Annie, and I just spent two days in Montgomery at the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum:  From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which covers a small hilltop above Alabama’s capital city. It is an extraordinarily uplifting name for what is, in fact, a heartrending tribute to the more than 4,000 African American victims of lynching in America.  

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