One More Footnote On The "open, glaring and scandalous tissue of lies" Issuing From "the Slaveholding wing Of the Supreme Court"

WHEN I FIRST said that I suspected the reason the Taney majority in the Dred Scott decision made the unprecedented and outrageous claim that they could overturn the thirty-seven year old Missouri Compromise Act by fiat of the unelected Supreme Court, something we know they knew was an outrageous innovation through the dissenting opinions of Curtis and McClean which they certainly read before the ruling was issued, I said that I thought they meant to outlaw abolitionism and to crush it everywhere in the United States, nullifying state laws abolishing slavery in those states where it was abolished, by declaring that slave-owners could bring their slaves, as slaves anywhere they wanted to and to rent them out as the enslaver of Dred Scott and his family had done in what was supposed to be the free territories in the North.  

I hadn't, yet found contemporary confirmation of my suspicion but I fully expected that that contemporaneous evidence would be there and it is for anyone to have read.

Fredrick Douglass certainly knew that was what the Taney Court was up to when they made that extraordinary claim of extra-Constitutional power, in his 1857 address on the Dred Scott decision he said it exactly as I suspected it to be:

This last settlement must be called the Taney settlement. We are now told, in tones of lofty exultation, that the day is lost—all lost—and that we might as well give up the struggle. The highest authority has spoken. The voice of the Supreme Court has gone out over the troubled waves of the National Conscience, saying peace, be still.

This infamous decision of the Slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court maintains that slaves are within the contemplation of the Constitution of the United States, property; that slaves are property in the same sense that horses, sheep, and swine are property; that the old doctrine that slavery is a creature of local law is false; that the right of the slaveholder to his slave does not depend upon the local law, but is secured wherever the Constitution of the United States extends; that Congress has no right to prohibit slavery anywhere; that slavery may go in safety anywhere under the star-spangled banner; that colored persons of African descent have no rights that white men are bound to respect; that colored men of African descent are not and cannot be citizens of the United States.

You will readily ask me how I am affected by this devilish decision—this judicial incarnation of wolfishness? My answer is, and no thanks to the slave- holding wing of the Supreme Court, my hopes were never brighter than now.

I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies as that decision is, and has been, over and over, shown to be.

I would note that this speech was given thirty-seven years before The Lessons of the Hour,  wondering if he expected the court-power invented to do such evil would be definitively rejected and that slavery would be definitively abolished through changing the law and amending the Constitution.  The court-created power to both nullify laws passed by the Congress and to amend the Constitution as a fact by their rulings played a very large role in thwarting those idealistic expectations.  

The Roberts Court is sending us back to something that is closer to what the aged Fredrick Douglass experienced than I'd have thought was possible in the early 1970s though by 1980 with the changing Supreme Court, the media promotion of Republicans (just as they are now in their sinking of Joe Biden)  I was already beginning to understand that changing the law wasn't enough, it would have to be protected from both the imperial Court and the media that the court had freed to lie on behalf of the oligarchs.  There is no way to stop the imperial Court doing it unless Republicans don't win at the polls and the media are doing everything they can to make sure they will win. 

Update:  I should have recommended reading Fredrick Douglass's Dred Scott speech because it contains a concise catalog of the lies contained in the majority decision in the Dred Scott case, easier to get through than the dissenting opinions and fuller.   A lot of what can be said about the dishonesty of the current court, when they deign to give an excuse for their decisions, is contained in the criticism of the Taney Court.  I'm always impressed when I read Fredrick Douglass and am always reminded of what Lincoln said, that he was "the most meritorious man" he'd ever met.   

He also notes how even those who had been opposed to slavery were corrupted by subtle means of influence and by habituation to how things were, it's a remarkable act of understanding of the minds of the privileged class and how even their moral insights were able to be corrupted by the indigenous form of American fascism then, certainly that's the same now as it ever was.