Taney

[Mark Graber]

My own belief, based on a reasonably thorough investigation of the sources is that there would have been no agreement had the farmers explicitly debated the citizenship rights of persons of color and that the framers implicitly understood the territories would be divided up between free and slave states.

Mark A. Graber
mgraber at gvpt.umd.edu

>>> DBERNSTE at WPGATE.GMU.EDU 10/11/00 04:58PM >>>
Perhaps the appropriate question is this: if somone had tried to put
Taney's Dredd Scott conclusion into the Constitution, would it have
carried?  The absence of any mention of race in the Constitution
suggests that (1) there was sentiment, at least among the framers if not
"the people" to avoid creating an explicit caste system beyond the
already troubling area of slavery; free people of color would therefore
be subject to no explicit federal disabilities, and in particular were
citizens like everyone else; or (2) it was so blatantly obvious that
blacks could not be citizens that there was no need to mention it.  I
wonder whether (1) is true (it's more or less what I grew up on, but it
wouldn't be the first historical myth I've encountered), and if so,
whether Taney was anachronistically reading later attitudes, especially
southern attitudes into the Constitution.  Any historians want to help?

David E. Bernstein
Associate Professor
George Mason University
School of Law
3401 N. Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22201
(703) 993-8089
dbernste at wpgate.gmu.edu
<http://members.aol.com/deliotb/home.html>