Free Republic

Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s name has been removed from a historic warship in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor by the Living Classrooms Foundation. The foundation’s removal of Taney’s name from the ship serves as the latest in a series of gestures meant to acknowledge past wrongs and signal solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police. James Piper Bond, LCF president and CEO, said in a statement Wednesday that the organization was inspired to make the change, calling the court ruling “an abomination” and “great injustice”...

Under the cover of night, a work crew removed the statue of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — author of the infamous Dred Scott decision — from the grounds of the State House, ending the monument’s 145-year prominent perch in Annapolis. At 12:20 a.m. Friday, flatbed trucks with equipment including a large crane pulled onto the street encircling the State House. Workers cordoned off the front lawn of the historic building and placed straps around the statue, the latest monument linked to the Confederate era to be removed from a public square. Just before 2 a.m., the...

Third Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Jonesboro, Illinois September 15, 1858 MR. DOUGLAS' SPEECH. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I appear before you today in pursuance of a previous notice, and have made arrangements with Mr. Lincoln to divide time, and discuss with him the leading political topics that now agitate the country. Prior to 1854 this country was divided into two great political parties known as Whig and Democratic. These parties differed from each other on certain questions which were then deemed to be important to the best interests of the Republic. Whig and Democrats differed about a bank, the...

The framers of the United States Constitution believed that people of African descent “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and that “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit…. [to be] bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.” With reference to the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence: “It is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race was not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people...

From Wikipedia: Dred Scott was an American slave who was taken first to Illinois, a free state, and then to Minnesota, a free territory, for an extended period of time, and then back to the slave state of Missouri. After his original master died, he sued for his freedom. He initially won his freedom from a Missouri lower court, but the decision was reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court and remanded to the trial court. Simultaneously, Scott had filed suit in federal court, where, after prevailing on the issue of his status as a citizen of Missouri, he lost a...

Imagine that America had a Chief Justice of the United States who actually believed in enforcing the Constitution and, accordingly, issued an opinion that the war in Iraq was unconstitutional because Congress did not fulfill its constitutional duty in declaring war. Imagine also that the neocon media, think tanks, magazines, radio talk shows, and television talking heads then waged a vicious, months-long smear campaign against the chief justice, insinuating that he was guilty of treason and should face the punishment for it. Imagine that he is so demonized that President Bush is emboldened to issue an arrest warrant for the...