[woodpusher]

[ProgressingAmerica #98 to BroJoeK #95] Can't find time to remember that John Marshall was a slave owner. And they quote him regularly and gleefully. Why isn't Marshall a racist? You're quoting a racist?

John Marshall owned over 300 slaves. While Jefferson inherited, Marshall purchased. BroJoeK claims the terms racist and racism have no definition anymore. Of course John Marshall was racist, as was any life-long slave owner. But that undercuts Brother Joe's contention that all Founders fought a lifelong battle for abolition of slavery.

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Marshall. The most prominent Founders were lifelong slave owners. Not every Founder was a saint. Ten of the first twelve Presidents were slave owners. Presidents number 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17 and 18 were slaveowners. 18 was Grant. 2 and 6 were John and John Quincy Adams who strongly opposed slavery. From 1789 to 1850, for only eight years was there a President who was not a slave owner. That does not have much to do with the state of race relations today, but it does have much to do with history, and how things such as the fugitive slave provisions found their way into the Articles of Confederation, the Ordinance of the Northwest Territory, and the Constitution. The Articles and the Constitution were unanimous consent documents—the Founders and Framers did that. At times, history is messy.

The Antelope was not just Marshall. There is no dissenting opinion.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/chief-justice-john-marshall-slaves/619160/

Paul J. Finkleman, The Atlantic, June 15, 2021, updated Jun 24, 2021

Earlier biographers argued that he did not seek investment profit from slavery; that he owned a “dozen house servants” in Richmond, Virginia; that he disliked slavery but went along with it because he was a practical man focused on strengthening the national government; and that as a justice he heard very few cases involving slavery. He accepted the system and focused on other issues.

None of this is true. I spent three years analyzing every case dealing with slavery that the Marshall Court heard, including many that previous scholars had ignored, brought by people held as slaves who had strong legal claims to being freed, and others involving the illegal African slave trade; examining census and tax records revealing Marshall’s huge personal investment in enslaved people; looking at his private letters that display his attention to buying and selling human beings; scrutinizing business records showing his purchases of enslaved people; and consulting the three versions of his will, which also revealed his commitment to slavery. What I found totally upended the established view: Marshall not only owned people; he owned many of them—certainly more than 300—across the years of his life. Unlike other major slaveholders, such as his cousin Thomas Jefferson, Marshall did not inherit enslaved people; he aggressively bought them when he could. Whether buying young children, or a mother and one of her children, or selling them to raise cash, he paid little attention to the enslaved families he destroyed in his lifelong quest for more human property. Marshall’s biographers assert that he was not brutal or violent toward the people he owned, and this may well be true. But Marshall had day-to-day contact with only the dozen and a half enslaved people in his household. We have no knowledge about how the overseers on Marshall’s land in other parts of Virginia treated the chief justice’s human property.

[...]

Marshall, this great father of American law, was professionally deeply committed to slavery too. His jurisprudence was guided not by justice but by the ideology and worldview of someone who held other humans in slavery. In all of his opinions involving slavery, he always sought “justice” for slaveholders and never for the people they held—sometimes illegally—in bondage.

[BroJoeK]

woodpusher: "John Marshall owned over 300 slaves. While Jefferson inherited, Marshall purchased.
BroJoeK claims the terms racist and racism have no definition anymore.
Of course John Marshall was racist, as was any life-long slave owner.
But that undercuts Brother Joe's contention that all Founders fought a lifelong battle for abolition of slavery."

Woodpusher, you reveal yourself as a true Democrat when you refuse to speak accurately of your opponents' opinions.

Nobody can deny that the word "racist" has no meaning in today's degraded political discourse, beyond Democrats saying, in effect, "you disagree with me on something important and that makes you a racist", or fascist, or sexist, or homophobe or... whatever pops into their little minds today.

And racism among our Founders is also meaningless, since "racism" was never an issue they discussed or even imagined.
No Founder ever accused another Founder of being "racist" or even attempted to define what such an unknown word might someday mean.

What our Founders did often discuss and act on were efforts to restrict or abolish slavery, not because of "racism", but rather because they understood that slavery itself was morally wrong and should be abolished, eventually, regardless of "race".

So, woodpusher, I'm asking you to overturn your lifelong Democrat indoctrination and look at the real truth for a change.
In the 1825 Antelope case, Marshall acted entirely typically of our Founders, which was to:

1. Express his repugnance for slavery as an institution.

2. Acknowledge that what we call "settled law" supported slavery in this case.

3. Ordered the vast majority of the surviving slaves to be freed.

I contrast Marshall to Democrat Fire Eaters of the 1850s who supported reopening international imports of slaves and about whom fellow Democrats like Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas said they were importing thousands of African slaves per year, despite laws against it.

woodpusher: "Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Marshall.
The most prominent Founders were lifelong slave owners.
Not every Founder was a saint. "

Nor were they all devils.
All of our Founders took or supported actions to restrict or abolish slavery wherever they could.
Their practice was gradual abolition and it worked until roughly 1835, when the next generation of Southerners reversed it, insisting -- for the first time -- that slavery was good and should be expanded wherever possible.

woodpusher: "Marshall, this great father of American law, was professionally deeply committed to slavery too.
His jurisprudence was guided not by justice but by the ideology and worldview of someone who held other humans in slavery.
In all of his opinions involving slavery, he always sought “justice” for slaveholders and never for the people they held—sometimes illegally—in bondage."

And yet... and yet... in the 1825 Antelope case, Marshall freed the vast majority of survivors.
In that, he was typical of our Founders and very not-typical of 1860 era Fire Eating Democrats.