As we saw in yesterday’s posting, the “issue behind the
issue,” that is, the true significance of Roe
v. Wade, was not the particular decision of the United States Supreme Court
in 1973. It is, rather, the fact that
the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade
reflected a prior bad resolution to a serious problem: the question as to what,
exactly, is a human person, and who decides who or what is a person?
This conflict was built into the United States from the very
beginning. The Founding Fathers
attempted to establish a government based on the precepts of the natural law,
especially the sovereignty of the human person.
At the same time, however, they violated these precepts at the most
profound level by allowing the contradiction of human chattel slavery (human
beings owned as private property by other human beings) to continue.
What made matters worse was that a number of technological
advances made chattel slavery seem economically essential. The cotton gin made it possible to process
tons of cotton in the time it had previously taken to process pounds. The invention of power looms combined with a
ready supply of cheap fiber made decent and affordable clothing for the masses
a reality.
Once cotton could be supplied in seemingly inexhaustible
streams, it rapidly supplanted wool and linen, both of which took longer to
produce in lesser quantity, and were more costly to process. Cotton, as David Christy put it in his 1855 monograph
justifying slavery, was king. The
economic survival of both the United States and the British Empire, Christy
claimed, depended absolutely on the slave cultivation of cotton.
It comes as no surprise, then, that in 1857, when a slave
named Dred Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken
him into the free states where slavery was illegal, the United States Supreme
Court ruled against him. No human being
of African birth or descent, so the Court declared, could ever be a person as
that term is meant in the U.S. Constitution.
Obviously, as the South had been attempting to do for nearly
forty years, the Dred Scott decision overturned the Missouri Compromise of
1820. Anyone who wanted to own slaves,
even if he did so in the free states, could now do so. Slaves by definition have no rights, and you
need rights to be a person.
Evidently unnoticed at the time was the fact that the Dred
Scott decision made a fundamental change in the theory of sovereignty on which
the United States was founded. Before
1857, the theory was that rights are inherent in each human being, and granted
to the State by the organized body of the citizens. The human person was sovereign.
After 1857, the theory was that rights are somehow inherent
in the State, and the State decides who or what is a person, and then doles out
rights to those the State chooses to recognize as persons. The State was sovereign.
It’s impossible at this point to know whether or not the
judges making the decision, or even the people pushing for it, realized what
had to happen. Maybe all they were
thinking of was the presumed necessity of expanding the cultivation of cotton
as far as possible — and they were convinced that the cultivation of cotton
depended absolutely on slave labor.
The fact is that cotton wears out land. To keep production up, constant expansion is
essential if no effort is made to maintain the land or replenish the soil. Southern cotton producers believed they had
to bring as much land under cultivation as possible to continue to produce
enough cotton to feed the mills of Manchester, and that meant that slavery,
too, had to expand.
