As we saw yesterday, in the notorious Dred Scott decision,
the United States Supreme Court ruled that, to all intents and purposes, rights
come from the State and are vested in the people at the discretion of the
State. Under traditional natural law
theory, of course, rights are inherent in each human being, and are vested in
the State at the discretion of the people.
As Pius XI pointed out,
“But on final analysis, even in this latter function [i.e., man is not made to live alone, but
in society], society is made for man, that he may recognize this reflection of
God's perfection, and refer it in praise and adoration to the Creator. Only
man, the human person, and not society in any form is endowed with reason and a
morally free will.” [Emphasis added.] (Divini
Redemptoris, § 29.)
After the Civil War, Congress adopted the “Reconstruction
Amendments” to the Constitution. These
were the 13th, that abolished chattel slavery, and the 14th,
that, in relevant part, overturned Scott
v. Sandford. The 14th
Amendment was intended to secure the full spectrum of natural rights to every
single human being. The idea was to
recognize for all time that rights are inherent in actual, flesh and blood
human beings, not the State or society in any form.
It lasted less than five years. In 1873 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a
decision in “the Slaughterhouse Cases.”
We’ve covered the details of this fiasco before, so we won’t do it again
today. The important thing is that the
Court took the first opportunity that presented itself to nullify the 14th
Amendment and reassert the new theory that rights come from the State . . . but
in a way that allowed the Court to go in the other direction if it was found to
be convenient or expedient in the future.
As Crosskey explained,
“So,
the Court’s opinion in the Slaughter-House
Cases was, undoubtedly, most craftily written; written so as to enable the
Court, with a good face, in future cases, to jump either way: to observe the
intended meaning of the Privileges and Immunities Clause if that seemed
unavoidable, or, in the alternative, to destroy the clause utterly if this
seemed safe. And the fact that this
elaborate preparation was made also means that the majority Justices saw and
fully comprehended the possibility of the intermediate, plain, and sensible
meaning of the Privileges and Immunities Clause here expounded, to which,
indeed, Justice Bradley called attention, in his dissenting opinion. So, the majority must, as the minority
charged, already have determined, if
they dared, to destroy this new provision of the Constitution [i.e., the Fourteenth Amendment]
completely. (William Winslow Crosskey, Politics
and the Constitution in the History of the United States. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago
Press, 1953, 1130.)
For our purposes, the import of the Supreme Court’s opinion
in Slaughterhouse was that it turned
private property from a natural right, into a prudential grant from the State. Private property could now be defined both as to existence and to exercise as the government saw fit. This completely undermined the natural law
basis of the government of the United States.
Crosskey saw Slaughterhouse
as a watershed judicial event in the history of the United States. He wasn’t wrong. Many people today, especially in the Pro-Life
movement, view Roe v. Wade in the
same light. Roe v. Wade would have been inconceivable, however, had not the
Supreme Court’s opinion in Slaughterhouse
upheld the Dred Scott decision and nullified the 14th
Amendment. This laid the foundation for the
expansion of State power beyond all bounds and the establishment and
maintenance of the Servile State.