Dred Scott

This was written on August 5, 2003. I have to point out that the term "cheap labor conservative" was coined to counter people talking about "big spending liberals." That is, conservatives will to anything to make labor cheap, usually by having a very high unemployment rate. The term is used here, and I wish it had caught on:

Surfing around the site above, I came across this statement:

9. Declared contrary to Jeffersons dictum that all men are created equal that the black man has no rights the white man is bound to respect. This was the holding of Dred Scott v. Sandford, perhaps the single worst opinion in the history of the US Supreme Court.

This is given as an excess of the "cheap labor conservatives" but I think this analysis is a bit simplistic.

I've read the constitution, and the decision rendered was technically correct. That is, Dred Scott, who had gone to a free state, was required to be returned to his slave status when his owner returned to the slave state. ["No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."] This does not make it a wise decision, and proves the point that just because something is constitutional doesn't make it right.

The truth is that this was a straw, the straw that broke the camels back. The United States had been having major sectional problems for fifty years over the issue of slavery. There had been attempts at solving the problem, for example, Monroe's attempt to buy all slaves and ship them back to Africa. (There is a good reason why Monrovia in Liberia is named after president Monroe.) There were compromises such as the Missouri compromise, which only postponed the inevitable.

I think bringing this issue up without the surrounding context is misleading. It is true that the Dred Scott decision lead directly to the Civil war, but if it were not for the context, it would not have. For example, it chance had made it that non-slave states outnumbered slave states by a 3 to 2 margin, rather than their being exactly balanced, then the Dred Scott decision could have lead to the adoption of either the 13th amendment, or something closely related, without the war.

Certainly, I've seen it mentioned that many (possibly most) northern cities did not support the result, to the point that in some communities the federal agents trying to enforce this decision were literally rode out of town on a rail.

In combating any point of view, it is made much easier if we stick to the truth.