On Mar 18, 2008, at 4:42 PM, Charles Brown wrote:
> The founders established a constitution under which slaves were
> tradeable chattels--property--as Chief Justice Taney infamously, but
> absolutely correctly, established in the Dredd Scott decision.
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Maybe but Taney, went further than what you say above. He
> declared that all Blacks -- slaves as well as free -- were not and
> could never become citizens of the United States and
> that all Blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to
> respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to
> slavery for his benefit.The court also declared the 1820 Missouri
> Compromise unconstitutional, thus permitting slavery in all of the
> country's territories.That goes farther than allowing ownership of
> slaves. All that wasn't in the Constitution. Constitution doesn't
> say
> anything that can reasonably be interpreted as all Blacks can be
> enslaved or that only Blacks can be enslaved; or that Congress can
> make no law outlawing slavery in a territory. Or that all Whites
> can treat
> all Blacks like slaves. Says nothing about no citizenship for Blacks.
The constitutional point, as far as I can see, is that slaves were legally property and so the owners' rights were as absolutely protected as the rights to their horses (maybe even more so, since states were explicitly constitutionally required to return runaway slaves to their owners). Taney's racist obiter dicta at least served the very useful purpose of making the inevitable Civil War imminent.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos