The Problem of Slavery in Christian America: An Ethical-Judicial History of American Slavery and Racism

by Joel McDurmon

Thus the Supreme Court of the United States concluded that the Constitution, and thus all federal law, could not acknowledge blacks as U.S. citizens, but merely as “articles of property.” Thus, Dred Scott “established the legal rule that all African-Americans were presumptively slaves and had no rights under the Constitution. . . . Slaves under federal law were never people. They were property without a voice in a courtroom and without rights.”26 At one point in his opinion, Taney applied the well-worn fact that the southern states would never have agreed to Union if it had meant to give citizenship and rights to the slaves. Furthermore, we should all be wary of such a doctrine, because if blacks had citizenship under the Constitution, they would have immunity from the “police regulations” used to hold them in bondage: It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished. . . . Moreover, citizenship would mean that blacks would get to exercise all the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights: [I]t would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon...