Supreme Court's big birthright case

Can a president decide who gets to be a citizen?

Dred Scott (By Louis Schultze, Missouri History Museum)

It was precisely the right moment for an anti-slavery group to talk strategy.

“While four millions of our fellow countrymen are in chains,” Frederick Douglass told the American Abolition Society in New York on May 14, 1857, “while men, women, and children are bought and sold on the auction-block with horses, sheep, and swine — while the remorseless slave-whip draws the warm blood of our common humanity — it is meet that we … lift up our hearts and voices in earnest denunciation of the vile and shocking abomination.”

Douglass, who had escaped slavery as a young man, was speaking two months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against another man seeking freedom, Dred Scott.

The “infamous decision” not only denied that Scott was free by virtue of living in a free territory but found, Douglass said, that “colored persons of African descent have no rights that white men are bound to respect; that colored men of African descent are not and…