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

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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.”