ABSTRACT
The idea of being bought, sold, or held as property seems irreconcilable with being recognized as a human being. Taking the term "human" to be synonymous with "person" makes it easy to condemn the slave-holding United States- an undemanding and largely unproductive moral exercise. Across the United States, emancipation and abolition were curtailed by so-called Black Codes designed to deny African Americans many of the duties and rights associated not just with citizenship but with the most basic legal personhood. If the federal Constitution followed state and colonial laws in discerning in the slave a uniquely uncivil capacity for personhood, public executions had for well over a century offered the occasion for Americans to display their belief in slaves' humanity. Taney's revisionist history accomplishes the retrospective and retroactive denial of African Americans' civil rights through a misleading narrative that pits the racially progressive present against a benighted past.
