Dred Scott Decision Quotes
Many free Negroes of the day did not have the paperwork, education, , sophistication, or access to attorneys that could prove that they were free. Scheming Southerner slave owners would go north find poor ignorant free blacks and swear that they ran away from their plantation. If the victim could not prove the contrary, he was enslaved, transported South and usually sold.
In the early days of the Civil War slaves who escaped and reached the Northern lines were routinely returned to their Southern owners as the Fugitive Slave Act required. The first actual emancipation of the Civil war was not the President’s proclamation but was Butler who as a Union General ordered that the slaves escaping from Virginia no longer be returned. He was accused of violating the then existing law, however he had a legal rationale which hoisted Virginia on its own petard.
In the entire history of the Supreme Court there have been relatively few times where the personal opinions and interests of the Supreme Court justices tended to warp the decision making process of the court. Perhaps the worst of these was the Dred Scott Decision where the court ruled that the laws of non-slave states could not protect escaped slaves no longer living in the South or their children for that matter. The slave owning court majority completely reversed their traditional support of states’ rights and voted that the Northern legal establishment could must not protect ex-slaves and must return them to their “rightful owners.” This decision made the Civil War inevitable. The slave owning justices were under great pressure, economic and social. Slaves, at the time constituted the greatest economic asset of the Southern states in dollar value. Further, at the time, there was no way to farm most Southern land without slaves, and even real estate values depended on slavery.
In the Dred Scott decision, the Declaration of Independence:
This was a terrible Supreme Court decision which placed slave owning whites against whites who opposed slavery in conflict over runaway slaves and free blacks throughout the country. It held that Blacks—even free Blacks had no Constitutional rights and was one of the major causes of the Civil War. See {623426}.
This is an incredibly important political and historical quotation. One of the leading white ministers of Boston, advises all Blacks (and implicitly whites as well) not to cooperate with the Boston Police. Under the Dred Scott and other legal doctrines, the law enforcement mechanism of even Northern, anti Slavery states, would arrest and hold those suspected of being runaway slaves. This included many ex slaves but also many freemen who were then enslaved by the system. Law enforcement was no better than the slave owners and the slave catchers as far as the welfare of Blacks was concerned. The result has been a hostility to and an antipathy to law enforcement in the North who – even in the view of many whites like Parker were not worthy of trust and cooperation. After slavery, law enforcement supported and enforced the Jim Crow discriminatory laws. The resentment and distrust remains.
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning
