Stack the Senate instead of the Court

[Belsnickel]

(10-15-2020, 03:27 PM)PhilHos Wrote: I honestly don't know. That's why I asked.


Again, I don't know. I know that slavery was upheld in the Supreme Court but outside of that, I just always had this impression that were it not for things like Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation that drastic change would not have happened as soon as they did because the majority were not in favor of change. Couldn't tell you why I have that impression, though.

So, the Taney Court really did a number on things, true. The issue is that even though the Union states had 18.5 million people and the CSA had 9 million (5.5 free, and 3.5 enslaved) the judicial circuits were set up by geography and not population. There were 9 circuits during most of the Taney period, and of those 9, 5 contained exclusively slave states (at least one of those also contained two union states). Since there was a tradition of a justice coming from each circuit, 5 were coming from heavily pro-slavery areas. So the majority on the bench came from a minority population that was pro-slavery.

Of course, it's generalizing to count all members of slave states as pro-slavery and members of non-slave states as abolitionists. My ancestors in Virginia were abolitionists, for example, and at least one was executed for it because they suspected he was a spy. But it works well enough for a message board conversation.