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Having lived with his wife in two states that prohibited slavery, Scott argued that he and his wife were, and should be declared legally, free. His case worked its way through the court system until on March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court. And here, in part, is what Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote about Mr. Scott's efforts to experience the liberties, including liberty of person, we now take for granted. At the time of the drafting of the Constitute, said the Justice, persons of African heritage were seen as "... beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Thus, although the Constitution presupposes the Declaration of Independence's assertion that "all men are created equal," it does not confer such equality of African-Americans. Indeed, given that slavery was permitted at the time of the Declaration itself, Mr. Taney argued that the Founders themselves believed blacks were not "men."

Of course, this specious argument assumes that the political philosophy endorsed by the Founders in the Declaration found its way without hindrance into the laws of the United States, including those involving slavery. This is ludicrous: To assert and affirm a moral truth is not the same as practicing it, and the Founders knew it. Even slaveholder Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in his "Notes on the State of Virginia" that to assert that the worst white man was better than the finest black man was nonsense.

It's also worth noting that Justice Taney was not above what we today would call "playing the race card." He wrote of what was, to some whites, the shudder-inducing prospect of black Americans going where they wanted to: "[Freedom] would give to persons of the negro race, ... the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, ... to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased ... the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went."

To suggest that persons of African heritage do not possess, nor should exercise, these rights breaks hard on the ear of decency. Sadly, many Americans in the 1850s were morally deaf, and, thus, the Civil War came.