While I Am Out

I'll BE OUT for a while today.  I have done some serious editing to yesterday's post in the Dred Scott series - news about the Putin atrocities in Ukraine has required all of our attention.   

Listening to the podcast about slavery in Maine, its real life existence almost certainly outlasting its merely legal and so alleged abolition her, I recommend it on its own.   What happened here certainly happened in most if not all of the Northern States during the very years during which the issues of the Dred Scott decision, the Missouri Compromise, the squatters sovereignty debacle that led to Bleeding Kansas and the disastrous power grab by the slave power on the Supreme Court, the results of which gave us government by judiciary so Patrica Wall's talk and Q and A are relevant to the discussion.  

Lives of Consequence With Patricia Wall

 

Patricia Q. Wall; Recorded February 10, 2018 - Through her new book, Lives of Consequence: Blacks in Early Kittery & Berwick in the Massachusetts Province of Maine , author Patricia Q. Wall reveals new startling information about the era of slavery in Maine's earliest settled region. Based on six years of intense research, Mrs. Wall'€™s wealth of findings not only banish the old myth of slavery's scarcity in Maine, they clearly point to significant impact of the labor, skills, and knowledge of hundreds of enslaved Blacks (i.e. Africans, Native Americans and people of mixed African, white and/or Native American heritage) on slave-owning families and on early economic development of communities and towns. Patricia Wall's book is available in the MHS Museum Store or online here .

I will also recommend this lecture about the Supreme Court and Slavery.   While Paul Finkelman is more polite than I am and so he often uses the word "slavery" where I would use the words "white supremacist,"  "racist," and talk about the brutality that is intrinsic to America's history and was embedded in the Constitution and the law by such racists as John Marshall, Roger Taney and the power that they extra-Constitutionally gave themselves in order to promote their own interests and their preferences for white supremacy.   Especially interesting is what he points out about the ability of slave power to corrupt the associate justice Joseph Story who started out opposed to slavery and ended up as bad as Taney.   Slave power with the frequently dishonest kind of legal logic that lies as it reasons and is never honest about it expressing the personal preference of the "justices" is entirely in line with what the Republican-fascist majority on the Roberts Court are doing to reimpose a form of 3/5ths that, this time, covers exactly those white voters who Republicans think might vote for Democrats, who, as I said, can be thought to stand in for the white abolitionists who I'm sure if Taney had dared, he would have kept from voting to protect slavery and the slave holders interests.