Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

In his Dred Scott opinion, which was designated the official opinion of the court amid several concurrences and two dissents, Taney insisted that a slaveholder’s “right of property in a slave” was “distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.” By that logic, he wrote, Congress was not permitted to ban slavery in any federal territory and had acted unconstitutionally in the past when it had done so.51 That was Taney’s most critical political intervention, but the chief justice also saw fit to declare that people of African descent, whether enslaved or free, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”52 In ways that sometimes go unrecognized, that resounding phrase was tied to a broader discussion of African Americans’ state and federal citizenship under the US Constitution. Here too, Taney’s argument was deeply embedded in contemporary politics. As