Tag Archives: Slavery

History & Law: ‘Beyond Logic And Freedom – The Dred Scott Decision’

The Imaginative Conservative (February 13, 2025): With his bold pronouncement in the Dred Scott decision that Congress had no jurisdiction over the territories, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney hoped to preempt all political discussion and debate. But he was sadly disappointed, for his majority opinion itself became the focus of a new, and ever more vicious, round of political battles as the presidential election of 1860 approached.

I. The Historical Background

On March 6, 1857, two days after James Buchanan took the oath of office as president of the United States, the Supreme court announced its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. John F.A. San[d]ford.[i]The case was complex and the decision long in coming. In 1834, an army surgeon named John Emerson reported for duty at Rock Island, Illinois.With him was Dred Scott, a slave whom he had recently purchased in St. Louis. Emerson kept Scott with him at Fort Armstrong for two years, despite an Illinois state law forbidding slavery. In 1836, the army posted Dr. Emerson to Fort Snelling, located in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, in what was then Wisconsin territory and which subsequently became the state of Minnesota. As before, he took his slave Dred Scott with him, although the Missouri Compromise explicitly prohibited slavery north of latitude 36° 30’. While stationed at Fort Snelling, Emerson bought a slave woman named Harriet, who eventually married Dred Scott, although the law did not sanction slave marriages. After several years, the army again transferred Emerson, whose slaves returned with him to Missouri.[ii]

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III. Consequences & Significance

Not since Marbury v. Madison in 1803 had the Supreme Court employed the principle of judicial review to overturn congressional legislation. The court’s ruling that neither Congress nor the territorial governments could ban slavery, in effect, renounced both the Missouri Compromise and popular sovereignty. Taney had made it clear to Republicans that even should they win control of the national government they could not execute their pledge to keep the territories free of slavery. Slavery could only be proscribed after a territory became a state. By then it might be too well entrenched to remove. It appeared both to the opponents of slavery and to the advocates of free soil that Taney and a majority of the Supreme Court were parties to a vast conspiracy among slaveholders to take over the government.

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Book Reviews: “Humans In Shackles – An Atlantic History Of Slavery” (LSE)

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of SlaveryAna Lucia AraujoUniversity of Chicago Press. 2024.


Humans in shackles cover

LSE REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 5, 2025): At the close of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the eponymous revenant representing the deepest traumas of slavery’s violence has finally left the house she haunted. After a while, even her recurring footprints are forgotten: “by and by all trace is gone”. She is not simply forgotten but “disremembered and unaccounted for”. Howard University historian Ana Lucia Araujo’s hybrid trade-academic history of slavery makes specific reference to Belovedthe case of Margaret Garner that inspired it, and other horrific instances of infanticide from the Americas in a section that confronts the “combination of motherhood and slavery” as “haunted by tragedy” (323). This is just one example of the way in which Araujo’s book deliberately remembers and accounts for the individual lives, specific communities and broader cultural, social and economic structures touched, formed or devastated by chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.  

Humans in Shackles has four distinct but related aims. First, it aims to decentre the United States and English-speaking Caribbean islands in the history of slavery, arguing that this imbalance neglects, in particular, the place of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. This attention to Brazil, where slavery was not abolished until 1888, reveals important archival gaps. For instance, despite the fact that around 5.7 million enslaved people boarded ships on the coast of West Central Africa, and that the majority of these people were transported to Brazil (estimates from the SlaveVoyages website), there are no published first-hand accounts by Africans boarding ships on this part of the coast.  

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