Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 9: the white racist historical narrative behind the infamous Dred Scott decision

One notable aspect of Chief Justice Roger Taney is that he incorporated broad, ideological historical arguments about slavery and race.

David Thomas Konig discusses that outlook in an essay called "Constitutional Law and the Legitimation of History" in The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law (2010):

Taney’s opinion, however, did more than call on history to solidify slavery by showing it to be embedded in the American past, essential to its origins, justified by its religion, and inseparable from its present commitment to liberty. Those arguments had been made for decades, and by the 1850s there existed a widespread and deeply entrenched Southern tradition of using history to show the universality of slavery as a system and the suitability of Africans for it. Proslavery apologists, that is, already had constructed an “inescapable past” for American slavery and had used “history as moral and political instruction” to describe slavery as normal and racism natural.

Such a proslavery historical narrative brought the institution to the center of the national narrative and justified it against the rising din of antislavery argument, but it did not fully answer a new challenge emerging as Dred and Harriet Scott’s petition for freedom, commenced in the 1840s, moved slowly through the next decade. If history was to continue to provide the narrative basis for a jurisprudence of slavery and racial control, it had to address more than slavery and slaves: it had to respond to the historical reality of free African Americans whose past belied the conventional narrative, and whose vocal assertion of that fact contradicted the very foundations of proslavery jurisprudence. Taney had ample support for his version of the history of slavery; he had to create it for his version of free African Americans. [my emphasis]

In other words, the racial argument - which we could call Social Darwinism in hindsight (Darwin's On the Origin of Species wouldn't be published until 1859, and we can't blame Darwin himself for "Social Darwinism") - used to justify slavery also had the effect of excluding all Black people from equal humanity and basic rights. Taney and his Court raised this odious argument to the status of binding Constitutional law in the Dred Scott decision.

Konig goes on to remind his readers that the proslavery narrative was not only one that developed and hardened over time. It was also a contested narrative, although pitifully few leading American political figures were willing to challenge the notion of Black inferiority:

Taney’s opinion, to be sure, expressed the widespread and prevailing historical understanding among whites of the debased and excluded position of African Americans in the nation’s history. But it is vital for subsequent generations to be aware that such a view, however widely held in the nineteenth century, was nonetheless only one interpretation of that past available at the time, one that by the 1850s was coming under repeated attack as orthodoxy.