The delegates at Louisiana’s Constitutional Conference in October 1865 were so confident in the president’s support and their reclaimed power that they resolved, “We hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race; and in accordance with the constant adjudication of the United States Supreme Court”—specifically, the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1856, wherein Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had stated explicitly that black people have “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”
