As we saw in the
previous posting on this subject, Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in
Democracy in America that the failure to resolve the issue of slavery and the
treatment of Native Americans could undermine the foundations of American
liberal democracy. Nor were the popes
unaware of the dangers of a “democracy” that permitted some people to be treated
like things.
 |
| Pope Gregory XVI |
In 1837 Pope
Gregory XVI issued In Supremo, an
encyclical condemning the slave trade.
Although it is clear from the context that the pope used “slave trade”
as a synonym for the institution of slavery itself, and his effort was directed
primarily at the United States, bishops in the American South hastened to
reassure their flocks that the encyclical did not apply to them.
While not
excusable, this is understandable. From
1803 to 1937 cotton was the single largest export of the United States. Fortunes were built and maintained on the
cultivation of cotton, and it had all been made possible by the invention of
the cotton gin. Slavery was beginning to
fade when Eli Whitney’s invention removed the bottleneck from cotton production
and increased fifty-fold the rate at which it could be processed. Demand for slaves increased in proportion.
So did demand for
more land. Cotton is easy to grow but
depletes soil of essential nutrients.
Absent a program of rotating crops or otherwise restoring the land,
cotton cultivation — and slavery — had to keep moving west into the new
territories. The Missouri Compromise of
1820, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 attempted to
maintain a balance of political power between slave states and free states, but
economic pressures were building up.
Cotton was simply too profitable.
 |
| David Christy |
In 1855 David
Christy, a former abolitionist, published Cotton
is King. (David Christy, Cotton is King, or, The Culture of Cotton,
and its Relation to Agriculture, Manufactures and Commerce; to the Free Colored
People; and to Those Who Hold that Slavery is In Itself Sinful; by an American.
Cincinnati, Ohio: Moore,
Wilstach, Keys, 1855.) Christy
claimed that the economic survival of the United States and the British Empire
depended on the slave cultivation of cotton.
Economic necessity therefore dictated slavery must continue. (Christy
was not the first one to make these arguments but gave them their most
persuasive form. See, for example, “Whig
Principles: What’s Left of Them” from the Democratic magazine, The United States Review, December 1854,
Vol. 34, No. 12, 465-477.)
Two years later
the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that not only changed
the entire basis of the government of the United States, it changed history —
and not for the better. This was Scott v. Sandford, (60 U.S. 393 (1857).) known
to history as the Dred Scott case, one of the worst decisions ever handed down
by a court of law in a presumably free society.
 |
| Roger Brooke Taney |
The facts are straightforward. Dred Scott (1799-1858) argued that since he
had been taken to a state where slavery was illegal, he was ipso facto free. Scott had previously attempted to purchase
his freedom, but his master refused. The
Missouri Supreme Court held for Scott but was overturned on appeal to the
United States Supreme Court.
In his opinion
Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864) ignored thousands of years of
natural law theory as well as the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the
Declaration of Independence. Contrary to
the intent of the framers, Taney held that “persons” and “citizens” are
synonymous terms in the U.S. Constitution.
Since citizenship is granted by the State (so Taney argued), so are the
“natural” rights that confer personality. (Ibid.)
In Taney’s line
of reasoning, because Dred Scott was not a citizen but an “inferior being,” he
was ipso facto not a person. He therefore had no standing in the court and
could not sue for anything, much less his freedom: “[W]hether emancipated or
not, [Negroes have] no rights or privileges but such as those who [hold] the
power and the Government might choose to grant them.” (Ibid.)
Taney’s decision
changed the U.S. Constitution from a delegation of rights from people in order
to create a government, to a grant of rights from the government to create
persons. He rejected the theory, pivotal
in the formation of the United States, that certain rights inhere by nature in
human beings, making them automatically and irrevocably persons.
We will look at
how any American jurist could possibly hand down such a decision in the next
posting on this subject.
#30#
