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

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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.