The Third Reconstruction by Peniel E. Joseph

Author:Peniel E. Joseph [E., Peniel Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

I sometimes wonder if Donald Trump ever heard of Dred Scott. Not enough Americans have. The brutality of Scott’s life under chattel slavery and the cruel dismissal of his plea for freedom sped America’s path toward violent civil war and remain a source of enduring shame. In 1846, Scott sued for freedom for himself and his second wife, Harriet Scott, claiming residence in free-soil Illinois. The complex case found Scott and his wife returning to Missouri and seeking legal relief, in vain, from slavery’s seemingly infinite clutches. Scott’s case wound its way to the Supreme Court, which did more than rule against him in 1857. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision in Scott v. Sandford (the misspelled name of Scott’s owner, John F. A. Sanford) nationalized racial slavery, negating the long-held legal precedent that slavery’s rule ended at the borders of free territories and states.

Taney added insult to injury with words that continue to echo through the present. The court refused to recognize Scott as a “‘citizen’ within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.” The Supreme Court’s assertion that Black people had long been considered “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” outraged freedom-loving people across the nation; heightened the resolve of white Republican Party leaders, most notably Abraham Lincoln, to confront the slave power; and hastened the coming of the Civil War. It also cast bright lines around the questions that would become most visible, and most fiercely contested, during subsequent periods of Reconstruction—questions of democracy, justice, and citizenship.6

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