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BTW, this highlights a crucial point.
Those who, like Ms H-J, think Dred Scott was rightly decided, have only ONE piece of evidence to support the claim that the Const was meant to preserve slavery forever: that the slaveholding founders didn't immediately free their slaves. But https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1341074002136211457
Those who, like Ms H-J, think Dred Scott was rightly decided, have only ONE piece of evidence to support the claim that the Const was meant to preserve slavery forever: that the slaveholding founders didn't immediately free their slaves. But https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1341074002136211457
there were many reasons why slaveholding founders didn't emancipate them immediately in 1776. Some thought slavery was vanishing on its own. For others, state law prohibited emancip'n. Still others were just hypocrites.
NONE OF THIS proves the Const. was meant as pro-slavery.
NONE OF THIS proves the Const. was meant as pro-slavery.
This, of course, was the entire point of Lincoln's speech on the Dred Scott opinion https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/speech-on-the-dred-scott-decision/
"Chief Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, admits that the language of the Declaration is broad enough to include the whole human family, but he and Judge Douglas argue that the authors of that instrument did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they
did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one or another. And this is the staple
argument of both the Chief Justice and the Senator, for doing this obvious violence to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration. I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects.
They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal-equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They
meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit."
