"Great Scott, It's Dred Scott": article draft by Roosevelt Fitzgerald

GREAT SCO|U ITS DRED SCOTT BY
ROOSEVELT FITZGERALD
I guess I should've said something about the Ordinance of 1787 in last week's piece but I can't remember everything. Anyway, it is sometimes called the Northwest Ordinance. The Ordinance contained six provisions and one provided that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude would be permitted in the old Northwest Territory or in the states which would be ultimately carved therefrom. Those future states would include Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Those were years in which many new states entered the Union. With the exception of the efforts made to maintain a balance between slave and free, none of those events were noteworthy in and of themselves. At least, that's the way it seemed. More often than not, it is difficult to determine the far-reaching effects of a single event--which drop of water causes a dike to break?
Forty seven years following the adoption of the Northwest Ordinance, in 1834, a young,’ black, slave man was taken from St. Louis, Missouri, a slaveholding town in a slave-holding state, to Rock Island, Illinois and then to Fort Snelling in Wisconsin Territory. Slavery had been forbidden in both places. Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon, owing to his reassignments, took the slave Dred Scott out of a slave Bolding state onto free soil. The hiatus continued for almost four years. Eight years following their return to Missouri, in 1846, Scott sued for his liberty in the Missouri courts on the grounds that he had become free because of his stay on free soil in Illinois and Wisconsin. The lower court ruled in favor of Scott but that ruling was overturned in 1852 by the state supreme court. Ironically, that same court had previously ruled, in similar cases, that the slave became free upon his return to Missouri. An appeal to the Federal district court and, finally the
United States Supreme Court followed.
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The case of Dred Scott vs. Sandford (the actual spelling is Sanford but it was mi spelled in the official reports) became one of the landmark Supreme Court cases of our times. It addressed three points: Dred Scott's citizenship status and whether he was entitled to bring a suit in a Federal court; the question of whether residency on free soil and freedom remained valid following return to Missouri and whether or not the Missouri Compromise was constitutional in its prohibition of slavery north of 36°30'.
The majority opinion of the court, with that of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney being accepted as that of the majority of the justices, ruled on the three issues. First, it was decided that Scott, and therefore all black slaves and their descendants, was not a citizen of either the United States or the state of Missouri and therefore did not have the right to sue in the federal courts. Second, Scott's status was determined by the laws of the state in which he resided when the question of his freedom was raised and therefore his temporary residency on free soil was moot. Third, The Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional on the ground that under the 5th Amendment Congress was prohibited from depriving persons of their property without due process of law.
The Dred Scott decision became the first case since the historic Marbury vs. Madison case of 1803 in which the Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional. In declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, the court opened the door for the further expansion of slavery. Without the restrictions imposed by the Missouri Compromise, the results of the Kansas- Nebraska Act of 1853 which provided that the question of slavery .in states carved out of the Kansas-Nebraska territory being decided by popular sovereignty would allow for new states, wherever they might be, to decide in an open referendum whether to be slave or not. Similar referendums might also affect changes in the status of slavery in existing states.
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Roger B. Taney, southern born and reared in slave holding Maryland and sympathetic to the aims of slavery, was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1835 by President Andrew Jackson who was, himself, a native son of slave holding South Carolina and transplanted to slave holding Tennessee where he became a successful plantation owner and slaver holder.
Yes. You guessed it. "You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy." Who among you would believe that either of the two men mentioned above, who owed everything they were or hoped to be could possibly turn their backs on slavery? Forget it. Expecting Taney to support a ruling which could have a longtime negative result on slavery is tantamount to expecting the NCAA to render a decision which would be beneficial to UNLV.
We remember the scrutiny which Supreme Court hopeful Borg faced a few years ago. We remember the questionable actions he had taken dating back for a number of years. More than the negative things which he had done in regards to minority people and women during the course of his public life, we were unable to find anything positive which he had done. It would be most difficult to find anyone who is 100% of what we would like them to be 100% of the time. Even with people we know personally there are those times when we find faults. We can find fault with our spouses, loved ones and children and we can live with those so long as they do not equal or exceed their good points. Once the bad exceeds the good then it is time for a change. Borg had nothing good in his record. Now we must look at the most recent nominee for the court: David H. Souter.
The lone black justice on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, asked, several days ago; "Who is David Souter?" Many others have raised similar, questions. Some have suggested that President Bush submitted his name because Souter has not written anything which might prove controversial during the
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hearing process. Does that put him on the side of the angels? Not by a long shot. There are still many of us who can only see, with various degrees of accuracy, that which is there. There is much more than that. Remember what Bobby Kennedy used to say? "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not." It is not enough to have simply done little or no evil. We must look at what good a person has done. It is only by so doing that we can have some idea as to what they might do.
David Souter has said that affirmative action is merely affirmative discrimination. Ok. What has he said about discrimination of the original sort? I know of nothing. Does this mean that he condones discrimination so long as it is of the old fashioned kind and will do so in the future? Who can say. It is not given for us to peer mnto the future but we can gaze into the past at our leisure. If we seek out that which has happened we will surely find it. Of the future, we must wait to see for, of that, only the
Shadow knows.