Frederick Commission Acts on Taney Statue
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The city of Frederick’s Historic Preservation Commission is poised to take action aimed at quieting calls for removal of a racially charged statue in front of City Hall.
The panel was scheduled to vote last night to install a plaque explaining the role of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney in the slavery debate of the mid-1800s.
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Some local civil rights leaders demanded last year that the city remove the bronze bust of Taney, which was dedicated in 1931.
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(Posted on March 14, 2008)
Comments
The county that Branson, Mo. is in is Taney. I wonder how long it will be before civil rights activists demand that it be renamed. And the fact that it’s in rural Missouri won’t bother them — black legislators from St. Louis are constantly gnawing at the area of Callaway County known as “Little Dixie” to change its name.
Posted by Question Diversity at 5:51 PM on March 14
Why are some people called “civil rights leaders” when all they want to do is deny others of their civil rights?
Posted by Frank at 6:15 PM on March 14
“racially charged statue”
Surely it must be one of MLK, Malcom X or Paul Robeson…
Posted by at 9:32 PM on March 14
Regarding the impending decision of the City of Frederick’s Historic Preservation Commission to quietly remove the statue of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney author of the infamous Dred Scott decision, a decision which, incidentally was never overturned it would be well to consider the background of that ruling.
As is well known, Dred Scott, a slave (with his owner’s permission?), went to live in Chicago, Illinois, a free state, where he found a job, earned wages, and had to make the dozens of decision which a free man must make every day and which a slave is specifically forbidden to do.
Bearing this in mind, Dred Scott and his mentors sued in federal court to have himself declared a free man on account that he had acted as one in a number of years.
This case went all the way to the Supreme Court who ruled that a slave had no rights that a free man was bound to respect. Slaves were property and a man had the right to dispose of his property in the best way he saw fit. This ruling, which made the Civil War a certainty rather than a high probability, was devastating. Free states were no longer in a position to ban slavery from their territories.
I know I’m skating on thin ice here but what other decision could the Supreme Court have reached? The European powers abolished slavery in their territories by Order-in-Council, but that way was not open to the United States. To sum up; the President of the United States (those two emancipation proclamations not withstanding) did not have the power to abolish slavery, both houses of Congress did not have the power to abolish slavery, and the justices of the Supreme Court confessed their impotence to do so. It took three constitutional amendments (the 13th, 14th & 15th) to accomplish this task.
Assuming, for the sake of the argument, the decision of the Supreme Court had gone the other way and declared slavery unconstitutional, the Cotton States would have left the Union in 1857 and with James Buchanan in the White House; they might very well have got away with it. In that case, Abraham Lincoln—or whoever took the oath of the presidency of the United States on March 4th, 1861—would not have faced states in armed insurrection, but a sovereign nation with diplomatic relations with all of Europe as well as the Russian & Ottoman Empires, slave states both.
And the South might not have been the only one to secede. There were powerful mercantile circles who openly advocated the separation of New York City from the Union and setting up shop as an independent city-state like the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg and Bremen, then independent powers both. Indeed, such was the desire to secede that New York broke out in armed rebellion (the Draft Riots of July ‘63) and the Lincoln Administration had to send in regiments still reeling from the carnage of the Battle of Gettysburg to reasserts its authority.
E. David Litvak
Posted by E. David Litvak at 9:35 PM on March 14
Your right to swing your fist, stops where my nose begins. Civil rights activists are not required to admire anyone or recognize the achievements of any of our historic figures. Likewise, they have no right, civil or otherwise, to interfere with the rights of others to recognize the historic contributions of important Americans….Shucks, the only presidents of the US that did NOT own slaves outright, during the first fifty years of this Republic, were the Adams’. Does that mean we need to abolish all mention of George Washington? Mary Todd Lincoln’s family (wife of Abe Lincoln) were from Kentucky and they had owned slaves for decades. Lemmie see…..there goes the one dollar bill (and the quarter) and there goes the five dollar bill (and the penny). Jackson was one of the biggest slave owners in Tennessee. (I guess that kills the twenty dollar bill.) Sometimes you still see a two dollar bill….OH NO!…..Jefferson is on the two dollar bill (and the nickle)…..yet another slave owner! Alexander Hamilton was never president, though his face is on the ten dollar bill…it is not certain that he ever owned slaves himself, but it is certain that he did buy and sell slaves on behalf of others….YOU DON’T MEAN HE WAS A SLAVE TRADER! (There goes the ten dollar bill, too.)
Maybe these civil rights activists need to just quit using money altogether instead of worrying about statutes and plaques in public places.
Posted by Memphomaniac at 9:55 PM on March 14
Dear Frank (commentator above) This black racist bigots are never ” civil ” nor ” right ” what it comes to equality or constitutional law .I am 55 years old(1952 A.D.) and have known this since 1964 A.D. .
Posted by Michigan patriot at 10:29 PM on March 14
Justice Taney was the first Roman Catholic named to the Supreme Court. I supposed that doesn’t count for anything, but when we give up honoring a man like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln for MLK, there is no rationality in any honorarium. I await the re-naming of the George Washgington bridge for Rev. Al Sharpton. Don’t snicker, in NJ they are changing street names which honored the original Dutch settlers for Caesar Chavez who never stepped foot in NJ.
Posted by at 2:46 AM on March 15
Memphomaniac:
There have been such efforts against Washington and Jefferson. They’ll intensify if the civil rights industry is successful in its cultural genocide against the South.
BTW, Washington on the $1, Jefferson on the $2, and Adolph Lenin on the $5? Don’t forget about Morris Dees on the $3.
You may not think that the civil rights industry has any right to force you to recognize their heroes or to ignore their villains, but they give themselves that authority. And the mandates of equality and universalism philosophically ordain doing so.
BTW, Sam Francis was a blood relative of Mary Todd Lincoln.
Posted by Question Diversity at 11:21 AM on March 15
Local civil right groups are nothing more that a sham in name. What they really are is thinly veiled black supremacist groups. They will always find fault with the icons of white America. All they really want to do is ghettoize white America. Think it is bad now, wait if Obama gets elected as president. Then we will have our very own hip-hop president. I can’t believe that white Americans have degenerated this far. We are being destroyed by our sense of fair play, mercy & white guilt. Believe me, the other guys are incapable of playing by these same rules.
Posted by at 9:57 PM on March 15
Africans are natural Marxists. They have no problem destroying history or perverting it to suit their fragile psyches. Today, in the former first world nation of South Africa, airports are being renamed for African “revolutionary” heroes. Shall we examine the irony of people who had not yet invented the wheel, erasing the names of the people who brought flight, electricity, medicine, running water, and food security to a continent that had never known such things?
American Africans are no different. Anyone who is perceived to have slighted their “brothers” must be erased from history, just as they must be destroyed in the present.
Posted by Maggio at 1:03 PM on March 17
As a staunch Confederate I reluctantly have to agree with the civil rights hucksters. Mr. Taney deserves many things, but honors are not among them.
I addition to what Mr. Litvak said, Mr. Taney was responsible for overturning what at the time amounted to almost one hundred years of jurisprudence on slavery. More specifically I speak of the case of James Somerset. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somersett%27s_Case
In brief, James Somerset was a Virginia slave who was sent to England where he had been purchased by a Jamaican slaveholder. Somerset was encouraged by abolitionists to run away, which he promptly did. When he was caught the matter was taken to trial. Somerset was freed when the court ruled that slavery was so “odious” to the nature of a free society that it could only exist by virtue of positive law, i.e., the law had to specifically permit slavery and prescribe its conditions precisely.
And this landmark of legal wisdom was the precedent for US slave law in the US until the Dred Scott decision. Rather than be acknowledged as an institution that could only exist under conditions specifically prescribed by law, Mr. Taney ruled that owning slaves was a constitutional right that could be practiced anywhere in the US.
Normally judicial activism is considered a new phenomenon. But the case of Dred Scott shows that it is not. Arguably, this case had more to do with causing the Civil War than any other single factor. The northern states didn’t want slavery, and neither Mr. Taney nor the Supreme Court should have been permitted to dictate otherwise.
May Mr. Taney’s name live in infamy.
Posted by Dunnyveg at 5:35 PM on March 17