Year: 2003
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: introduction The Game of Genre Claiming of RightsDefending a slave charged with stealing a letter from a post office, an enterprising counsel argued that, according to the recent ruling of Dred Scott v Sandford (1857), a slave was not a legal person and thus not subject to the law. 1 His slippery argument in U.S. v Army (1859) raised to another level of absurdity the issue of persons as property and property in persons, which had challenged the legal system from the colonial period in the seventeenth century through the founding of the nation in the eighteenth and into the middle of the nineteenth centuries, when former ''property,'' such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, spoke eloquently as ''persons'' against chattel slavery.Roger B. Taney, the presiding chief justice of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, began that decision by raising the key question of civil rights for slaves: ''The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, granted by that instrument to the citizen?'' 2Taney's answer to the question was a stunning blow to all people of African descent in the United States, whether free or slave.He determined that even before the nation's founding, ''the negro race'' had been ''regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so Downloaded from read.dukeupress.
Source: Duke University Press eBooks
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4211022280