Posted on 03/08/2007 9:07:26 AM PST by lunarbicep
Some progress.
Now it's a fetus that has "no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
7 Democratic judges and 2 Republican judges(or what would become Republican judges - the party was only 3 years old in 1857).
Oh Lord! Wait for the apologies to fly!
So if precedent is taken as law, why is not this decision brought to bear on current situations with terror suspects and illegal immigrants?
Yes, Virginia...it was a rhetorical question.
didn't the two Republicans dissent?
Yes, see http://grandoldpartisan.typepad.com for details.
One of those Republican justices sought the Republican presidential nomination the year before Dred Scott.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1797381/posts
bills on Hill to apologize to Indians, blacks.....
Writing for the majority, Justice William Scott (not related to Dred Scott) praised God for instituting slavery, whereby men like Dred Scott could be elevated above the level of miserable Africans. The introduction of slavery amongst us, he continued, was in the providence of God, who makes the evil passions of men subservient to His own glory, a means of placing that unhappy race within the pale of civilized nations.
I know Justice William Scott and Taney were in for a very rude awakening when they went to meet God. I am pretty sure if they did somehow make it to heaven they are seriously regretting their decisions. I would have paid to see how Justice Scott explain this to God. I am pretty sure a lot of them found out in the end the error of their ways.
Good point - Although I suspect the civil war amendments likely had something to do with terrorists having civil rights. Another shocker is the Supreme Court protecting property rights of slave owners - but they won't protect land owner property rights now!
The Court's first major effort at rewriting the Constitution so that it would say what it "should say," rather than what it does say.
The single biggest factor leading to the Civil War, this decision turned out to be an utter disaster for its own side.
It is fascinating that 7 of 9 judges were obviously southern in their sympathies, a reasonably good marker for the degree of southern influence in the federal government as a whole at the time.
When they saw they were losing this influence, largely as a direct result of this idiotic decision, they chose to jump overboard, dragging the rest of the country with them.
Slavery is practically condoned in the Bible (New and Old Testament), but that was over 2,000 years ago. What was right for a society in 500 BC isn't right for a rapidly industrialized economy.
Slavery wasn't an evil in a Subsistance, agricultural country. The alternative is that many of the slaves would have just perished.
Obviously, slavery has no place in a modern economy.
Too bad Abraham Lincoln and the Southern Firebrands did not
have the wisdom to understand that slavery was doomed to extinction, with or without a murderous Civil War.
It was the far 2007 and fear and collective guilt continued to grip our people...
"You have nothing to fear but fear itself."
Here is a link to the dissent of Justice Curtis:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford/Dissent_Curtis
And some Americans wouldn't still be waxing lyrical about the UK as the "mother country." (It's an ally, intrinsically the same as Germany, Japan, Australia, South Korea, etc.).
Yup, sure did.
The Industrial Revolution was still in its beginnings when these events took place. The Steam Engine had not yet become the mainstay of the entire economy from ag sector to heavy mfg. Had the Civil War not taken place, slavery would probably have lasted to the end of the century........
ping...
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