The rather bizarre Dred Scott Decision of the US Supreme Court before the Civil War

What are we to make of the rather bizarre Dred Scott Decision of the US Supreme Court, just before the US Civil War, which probably, more than anything else, actually guaranteed a civil war in the US? What could possibly prevail upon 80% of the Supreme Court justices to confidently assert that black people were not human beings, that they didn't even belong to the same species as white people? Because that is precisely what they all said. This was not a close decision, 7:2, that black men were not men! So, the constitutional principle that all men are created equal simply didn't apply to black people. Very weird! Now, slavery is at least as old as human civilization, we really shouldn't blame the old south for all the evils of slavery throughout human history. However, it would have never occurred to the ancient Greeks or Romans that their slaves were not human beings. After all, they had fought and defeated them in battle, in many cases, they could have lost, in which case the Greeks and Romans themselves might have become slaves! Nevertheless, they did, often anyway, see their slaves as being barbarians, if they came from other nations who they had pillaged or conquered, and, perhaps anyway, less capable than they themselves. The essential nature of competition in all human life was quite obvious to ancient people, even civilized people, they were still really just competing tribes, even if some were larger and more civilized. If you lost, you became a slave, because you obviously couldn't be the master of someone who had defeated you in battle. And, that's all there was. The dominant people, and their slaves. No social services, no welfare support, no unemployment insurance, no public housing, nothing. You won, or you were a slave. In fact, you could argue, that in the ancient civilized world, with no social support, but insufficient free fertile land to support people by foraging for food alone, or even hunting for it, that slavery was really the only social service around. After all, if you defeated a great city in battle, put all the adult men to the sword to prevent them from being a threat to you, burned down the city and all its farmland, you really had to take all the women and children into slavery, or they would certainly all die from starvation and exposure. However, there were some special aspects to slavery in the New World. It was essentially confined to black people, with some limited exceptions, for some very specific reasons, which had nothing to do with them being inferior. Firstly, there were some African states that regularly practiced slavery, and so, there was a ready supply of people accustomed to this lifestyle, more or less, anyway, there. This wasn't particularly the case anywhere else in world in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Secondly, Africans were accustomed to the heat and humidity and diseases of the tropical and sub-tropical climates in which the large lucrative tobacco and cotton and sugar plantations of the New World were operating. Thirdly, their black complexions made Africans much easier to track and control as a group than would be the case with Caucasian slaves, or even native Indian slaves, who could blend into their own communities, and escape slavery by this means. So, from a purely practical, economic point of view, Africans could be used by Europeans at this time as a controllable, relatively cheap source of labor, particularly in large mega-plantations, in which the work was very labor intensive. So, there became a cultural social institution that attempted to rationalize this exploitation. And, perhaps the latest and most extreme -- although the situation in Brazil may actually have been as bad, or worse -- was the American Old South in the nineteenth century, before the US civil war. An entire rich region of the planet, inhabited by rich Europeans, but worked entirely by poor African slaves. Incredibly unjust, but, quite profitable, and so, elegantly rationalized by learned theologians, learned jurists, learned writers journalists and politicians and, as we have seen, 80% of the justices on the US Supreme Court! Of course, this could not stand. The absolute hypocrisy of the judges on the US Supreme Court merely guaranteed a violent confrontation between the fools who agreed with them, and profited by their decision, and the majority of the population. #ethics #politics #law #USCivilWar #19thCenturyHistory #slavery #history