By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty, (www.bannerofliberty.com)
July 20, 2004
The people of the United States had debated the issue of slavery since the two states of the Southern colonies had forced the elimination of a section of the Declaration of Independence opposing slavery. In 1820 the Missouri Compromise, engineered by Henry Clay, allowed Maine to enter the union as a free state and Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state. Then in 1857 the United State Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, took a giant step towards the nationalization of slavery according to a frontier lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. The issue, which was hotly debated the following election year between two candidates for the U.S. Senate, Lincoln and Judge Stephen Douglas, was the right of states to legislate against and eliminate slavery.
In his “house divided” speech in Springfield, Illinois June 16, 1858, Lincoln summarized the impact of the Dred Scott decision on the lives of America’s blacks:
“First, that no Negro slave, imported as such from Africa, and no descendant of such slave, can ever be a citizen of any State, in the sense of that term as used in the Constitution of the United States. This point is made in order to deprive the negro, in every possible event, of the benefit of that provision of the United States Constitution, which declares that: "The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States."“Second, that "subject to the Constitution of the United States, " neither Congress nor a Territorial legislature can exclude slavery from any United States Territory. This point is made in order that individual men may fill up the Territories with slaves, without danger of losing them as property, and thus to enhance the chances of permanency to the institution through all the future.
“Third, that whether the holding a negro in actual slavery in a free State makes him free, as against the holder, the United States courts will not decide, but will leave to be decided by the courts of any slave State the negro may be forced into by the master. This point is made, not to be pressed immediately; but, if acquiesced in for a while, and apparently indorsed by the people at an election, then to sustain the logical conclusion that what Dred Scott's master might lawfully do with Dred Scott, in the free State of Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any other one, or one thousand slaves, in Illinois, or in any other free State.”
Two years later, even before Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated, the Southern States, starting with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, began seceding from the Union, thus setting the stage for the bloodiest war in American history. A larger percentage of Americans died or were wounded in the Civil War than any war before or since.
It is interesting that at the time Judge Douglas and others took the position that the Dred Scott decision ENDED the controversy, which had been going on over the spread of slavery into the territories and new states. He pointed out in his House Divided speech:
“We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, (the Kansas-Nebraska Act) with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.”
This strikes me as being remarkably similar to the situation Americans find themselves in due to some modern Supreme Court decisions. It was more than 30 years ago that the Supreme Court ruled that States could not legislate against abortion, thereby approving of a procedure that had been a criminal act in most states. Then, in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court found in Lawrence vs. Texas a Constitutional “right” to practice sodomy, thereby reversing itself on a sodomy decision in 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick, which found a Georgia law against sodomy constitutional.
In May of this year by the Massachusetts Supreme Court quickly followed up on Lawrence vs. Texas by finding a “right” for same sex persons engaged in sodomy to marry thereby destroying any notion that states may determine their own marriage laws.
The only solution to the problem, according to Constitution experts like Richard G. Wilkins of the J. Rueben Clark Law School at BYU, is a Constitutional Amendment. History tells us that what eventually settled the issue over slavery was not the Civil War. Constitutional Amendments introduced in Congress in 1865 settled it.
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States and was quickly passed even by Southern States, except for Mississippi and Texas. However, the 14th Amendment that has become the centerpiece of constitutional law in recent years was not approved. To force it through the system, the radical Republicans who controlled congress after Lincoln’s assassination passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 which abolished the legal governments of all ten of the southern States and placed them all under military occupation.
The only way the Southern States could lift the military occupation was by approving the 14th Amendment that states:
"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment also took the vote away from anyone in the Southern States who had “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the (US government) or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
That included pretty much every Southern male. Two years later, the 15th Amendment gave the vote to the black men of the south. It took 100 years for the bitterness the Republicans created with the 14th Amendment to dissipate, and now, it is the Republicans who are most upset by the havoc tyrannical judges are creating with their interpretations of 14th Amendment to the Constitution pertaining to abortion and marriage.
A tyrannical Supreme Court led directly to Civil War in 19th Century America. Hopefully, patience, good leaders and active citizens can find a better solution to the same problem in the 21st Century.
To Comment: Mary Mostert