On this 161st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford to deny American citizenship to any black person, whether slave or free, the mainstream media have uniformly overlooked a key feature of that grave miscarriage of justice: the decision was rendered in large part to prevent blacks from owning guns. Politico correctly observes that Dred Scott is “widely regarded as one of the Supreme Court’s worst decisions” and “an egregious example of seeking to impose a judicial solution to a political problem,” but it fails to articulate the civil rights central to that political problem.
The Dred Scott decision invalidated the Missouri Compromise of 1820, subsequently permitting slavery in every federal territory. Chief Justice Roger Taney went further to declare blacks “an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Taney recognized the ultimate contradiction at the heart of American slavery: if the human dignity described in the Declaration of Independence rests upon natural rights, then those rights are natural to black people as well as white, or they are not. If blacks possess natural rights, then slavery is an unnatural and intolerable evil; if they lack natural rights, blacks simply never can become American citizens, be they born slave or free.
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