The three decades preceding the Civil War — during which all black persons in the United States were ruled less than full citizens (Dred Scott decision in 1857) and citizens in the North’s free states were forced to assist slavecatchers (Fugitive Slave Act in 1850) — are rapidly being recreated in the United States, in new guises.
In that antebellum period, “Slave Power” was the Northern abolitionists’ term for the economic, social, and political influence wielded nationally by well-off enslavers in the South.
By counting a slave as three-fifths of a person but not permitting slaves to vote, the U.S. Constitution’s “three-fifths clause” conveyed disproportionate power to slave states in national politics. Handed that clause, the “Slave Power” dominated the presidency and the U.S. Congress, especially the Senate, and had vast influence on federal legislation and judicial appointments.
- Southerners muscled the Compromise of 1850 through Congress, which included a harsher Fugitive Slave Act. And in 1857, Chief Justice Taney’s Supreme Court ruled that all persons of African descent were not U.S. citizens and had no right to sue in federal court.
- With threats of fines or imprisonment, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act forced citizens in free states to assist slavecatchers. And the 1857 Dred Scott decision declared that black persons “have no rights a white man was bound to respect.”
Which brings us to 2025, as legislators in certain red states are trying to re-cast Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, “half-slave and half-free,” into “half-MAGA and half-Antifa.”
The parallel with Dred Scott is the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, under which the court rescinded a woman’s constitutional right to full health care and in effect decided that “equal protection of the laws” no longer applies to women. Parallels with the Fugitive Slave Act are red-state laws that attempt to extend the reach of these laws to citizens in other states, for example, the Texas law that tries to indict doctors in New York State for providing abortifacients — mifepristone and misoprostol — by the U.S. Postal Service.
- By bringing civil and criminal charges against a physician in New York for prescribing abortifacients by mail, Texas and Louisiana are trying to replicate the Fugitive Slave Act by forcing citizens in other states to obey their anti-abortion laws.
- And by revoking a woman’s constitutional right to full health care and implicitly ruling that “equal protection of the laws” no longer applies to women, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision echoes the Dred Scott decision.
The Civil War was fought for and against the Slave Power, and many believe that conflict has not yet been concluded. How will the current conflict over abortion be ultimately decided, and when?
Gren Whitman
Rock Hall