J. Robert Osborne
On March 6,1857 the Supreme Court of the United States announced its decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case. In the majority opinion Chief Justice Taney was attempting to once and for all deny the status of citizen under the United States Constitution for African Americans, slave or free, and leave it to individual states to determine the status of African Americans. He was seeking to exclude African Americans from the sovereignty granted citizens under the Constitution, regardless of a person's free or slave status, from all Constitutional protections by saying that they never were protected by the Constitution. Those protections that Taney said were denied African Americans were subsequently provided by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments soon after the Civil War ended.
As Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, his overt denial of national sovereignty for African Americans finally put to paper what had been left unsaid for over two hundred years, that there was no possibility of the assumption of citizenship for African Americans under the Constitution. Up until Taney's searing words the references to the political status of people referred to as negro among other terms had all been indirect and not specifically nominative in the two national documents of governance, the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution. Slavery flourished where cotton was grown under that same Constitution. Taney made the question unavoidable and it is that event that forced the members of Congress, President Lincoln and then President Johnson and eventually the Supreme Court to acknowledge the political presence of millions of people and the their full rights to citizenship of the United States.
When the states that became the Confederacy seceded in late 1860 and early 1861 there were only four states left in the Union where slavery was legal. In early 1862, the United States Congress began to deliberate in earnest the need for end of slavery in the states that had seceded. The Union was not going to remain uncommitted to the rights of African Americans and President Lincoln issued his own Emancipation Proclamation on January 1,1863 freeing forever the people enslaved in the territory still occupied by the Confederate States of America. The status of freed men and women still needed to be addressed by the national government. Lincoln had committed the United States Army to their protection as part of the Emancipation Proclamation but there was clearly a need to formally end slavery in all states and grant full rights to the very people that Taney had denied.
Before Lincoln was assassinated the Thirteenth Amendment had been proposed abolishing the institution of slavery in the United States. After his death and during Reconstruction the Fourteenth and then the Fifteenth Amendment were proposed and also ultimately ratified. The rights of former slaves and freedmen and women were not only added to protection by the United States Constitution but all states were also prohibited from abridging the "privileges and freedom or immunities of citizens of the United States" because "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States whereof they reside." The Fourteenth Amendment went further and prohibited any State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law as well as equal protection under the law." If Taney hadn't gone so far to articulate the exclusion of "former Africans and their descendants" then there may not have been such a comprehensive response as to the citizenship of those people he sought to exclude.
This curriculum unit is designed so that teachers can use the Supreme Court Decision as a link that links the ending of the first year of United States History that ends with the Civil War in New Haven with the beginning of the second year of United States History that begins with Reconstruction. The opinion of Chief Justice Roger Taney denying any hope of citizenship to all African Americans in 1857 was not only a precipitating event leading to the Civil War but its utter exclusion motivated the constituencies that opposed slavery to make sure that the people excluded by Taney and the Supreme Court would have those rights and that they would be protected by the three amendments to the Constitution that came from 1865 until 1870.
One of the larger issues that is impossible to fully delineate in this unit is the whole question of defining citizenship. The United States has had a very long and confused history of multiple definitions of what basic civil rights are after those seemingly protected by the Bill of Rights and an equally lengthy multifaceted history of trying to define what the term "citizen" actually means. There can be some additional lessons built around the issue of citizenship, Federal vs. State and the rights that should never be denied but somehow often are under the law of the land, the United States Constitution of seven Articles and twenty seven Amendments.
