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Originally Posted by cash Please show me where they said the cornerstone of the United States was slavery and white supremacy. |
Actually, we've been talking a lot about Dred Scott lately and I've been thinking on it. It seems to me the decision of the Taney Court -- certainly the opinion written by Chief Justice Taney -- was that the United States was built on a cornerstone of white supremacy and slavery, or something close to it.
But I note that the people of the North were outraged by that decision, that it led to a surge in popularity of the Republican Party, and served to unify those who opposed slavery into a cohesive force. That seems solid evidence that the people of the North
as a group were opposed to this concept, and tends to rebut everything Battalion wants to imply.
OTOH, the people of the South seem to have been relieved or happy with Dred Scott. We can understand why they would be, in a practical sense, because it tended to safeguard their property. Personally, I think that foolish, because the decision actually tossed out the way state courts had been dealing with the "once free, always free" concept even in the slave states, thus trampling on the concept of "state's rights" yet again.
The two dissenting opinions, by Justices McLean and Curtis, seem much better for a "states' rights" advocate than Taney's crushing of all ability to interfere with slavery, no matter the source. To Taney, slavery must be preserved above all, and the United States is a place of white supremacy.
For those who wonder about such things, Justice John McLean was an ambitious Ohio man who during a long career was affiliated with everything and everybody: an anti-Jackson Democrat associated with Calhoun, a pro-Jackson Democrat who later broke with Jackson, an Antimason, a Whig, a Free Soiler, and a Republican. A devout methodist who saw no conflict between politics and religion. Considered a pro-War Hawk nationalist at the beginning, he was later closely associated with "states' rights" decisions. Considered a strong anti-slavery man, he was outvoted in
Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) -- but also rejected attorney Seward's argument that a "higher law" allowed a man to harbor fugitive slaves in
Jones v. Van Zandt (1847), so he did not allow his position to completely override his understanding of the law. Essentially, an ambitious politican-judge who wanted to be President, but seems to have done a reasonable job of restraining himself in his decisions.
McLean was considered a candidate for the 1860 Republican Presidential nomination, and actually received 12 votes at the convention's first ballot. Lincoln indicated his support for McLean at one point in late 1859, when he did not think of himself as a viable candidate. But McLean sickened over the "Winter of Secession", and died April 4, 1861; imagine the chaos if he actually had been elected.
Justice Benjamin R. Curtis was Rhode Island born, a Boston Whig lawyer recommended for the Supreme Court by Daniel Webster. He has left three major legal feats behind him.
The first was in his first year on the Supreme Court, when he wrote the majority opinion for
Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852), a landmark case for the Commerce Clause of the Constitution and national regulation. Justice McLean wrote a dissenting opinion favoring "states' rights", but Curtis' opinion is essentially the law of the land to this day.
The second was Dred Scott v Sanford. While Justice McLean's opinion seems more eloquent, Justice Curtis' opinion contains better research and more powerful legal logic. Objectively viewed
, I think it refutes most of what Scott has to say about the denial of citizenship to blacks, and gives many examples of where negroes exercised the rights of citizens. Curtis resigned from the Supreme Court amidst the rancor following the Dred Scott decision, depriving that body of a powerful legal mind as the crisis of secession and war hurtled down upon the people.
The third came a decade later. Curtis had returned to Boston and resumed his legal practice. He was chosed as one of Andrew Johnson's defense attorneys for his impeachment case before Congress. In that role, Curtis managed to convince the members of the Senate that that impeachment was exclusively a judicial, not a political, proceeding, a trial of and not a vote of confidence in the president. That is how it is still viewed today.
Curtis supported the North in the Civil War, but wrote critically of Lincoln's use of power in the Emancipation Proclamation and the denial of habeas corpus, so he might have supported Taney on that if he had remained in the Court. He opposed Lincoln's re-election in 1864.
Regards,
Tim
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