Ruling 7–2 in the Dred Scott decision, the country’s final judicial arbiter held that blacks, free or chained, could never be citizens. Dating to colonial times, the nation had always looked at a Negro as property—“he was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise,” the court wrote. And what property it was: the total market value of slaves in the South at the time of the ruling was $3 billion, more than all the railroads, all the banks, any other American asset. To the founders, blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white
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