Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight recently warned that “with very different circumstances it may indeed be the mid or late 1850s again.” What could possibly justify such a grim comparison to the division and simmering, intermittent violence that culminated in America’s bloody Civil War? Then it hit me: personhood . In 1850, Congress ratified the Fugitive Slave Act. Under that law, slaves could be captured and forcibly returned to their owners even if they were found in a free state. Agitated abolitionists feared the North would become a stalking ground for bounty hunters. In 1857, the Supreme Court heightened the nation’s festering disarray with its notorious decision in Dred Scott vs. Sandford. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney affirmed that slaves were property and that the Fifth Amendment protected the property rights of their owners. The message was clear: Slaves were inescapably precluded from personhood. Once the high court hitched its constitutional authority to that racially skewed notion, the nation’s slide toward Civil War was all but inevitable. Now leap ahead 165 years. Anticipating the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a growing number of state legislatures are consigning […]
