Don't Say We Didn't Warn You, John Roberts

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Let us now conduct a brief review of the lecture that, as chance would have it, (Z) delivered yesterday. In 1846, an enslaved man named Dred Scott, along with his wife Harriet, filed a lawsuit demanding manumission. The argument was that while the duo had once lived in the slave state of Missouri, they had traveled with their owner to the non-slave states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. This being the case, their continued enslavement was illegal. Of the first 12 presidents of the United States, nine were Southern slave owners. You know what kind of judges Southern slave owners tend to appoint? That's right, Southern slave owners. And so, by the 1850s, the Supreme Court was jam-packed with slave-owning justices, including the Maryland slave owner who served as Chief Justice, Roger Taney. Taney held that post for close to 30 years, and had his fellow justices largely wrapped around his finger.

Posted by Hans at 12:00 PM | 1 COMMENT | permalink

When the Dred Scott case made it to the Supreme Court in 1856 (yep, it took 10 years), Taney sensed an opportunity to resolve the slavery question once and for all. By that time, the majority of Northerners wanted to see the institution limited to the states where it already existed, while the majority of Southerners wanted to see it spread, ideally as far and as wide as possible.

Taney, writing for the 7-2 majority, made two findings. The first was that the suit was fundamentally invalid, because Black men (and women) had no right to sue in an American court. The Chief Justice could have stopped there, but instead went on to also find that if the suit HAD been valid, Scott would still have lost, because the laws Congress had passed limiting slavery were invalid. In short, Taney said slavery was a state issue, and not a federal issue, and states and territories could do whatever they wanted when it came to legalization (sound vaguely familiar?). Problem solved!

Comments

...Southerners were, of course, thrilled by the work of their fellow Southerner. On the other hand, many Northerners were outraged, since the decision would not only have opened up all future territories to slavery, but would also have theoretically re-opened the issue in states where slavery had already been outlawed. So, Northerners said they would not honor the decision. That included a guy who had been out of politics for a decade, but who jumped right back in thanks to Taney (and other Southern shenanigans in 1856 and 1857), a fellow by the name of Abraham Lincoln. So, far from "resolving" the slavery issue, Taney's decision served only to pour fuel on the fire, while also condemning the Chief Justice to eternal shame as an incompetent, tone-deaf, partisan hack.

#1 | Posted by Hans at 2024-10-15 12:02 PM