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A bit busy...

I haven't blogged much, because I've been working on two articles. One is a comprehensive piece on how to restore firearm rights in a variety of situations, and the other is an exploration of the Dred Scott case. Just as one indication of how much the players in the latter were really pawns in a far bigger game: neither is correctly named in the court papers. Dred Scott's real name was Ethelred Scott. His opponent, named as John Sandford, actually spelled his last name Sanford.

And although Sanford stipulated that he claimed Scott as his slave, that claim was utterly bogus. The real claimant was his sister, Irene. But you can understand why his sister wanted to keep her name out of the papers ... she had married an antislavery congressman. (And she didn't succeed in keeping it out of the newspapers, either: right after the case was decided, all the pro-slavery papers began running the story of their ownership.).

Update: the ruling got a LOT of debate going, of course.... in particular, a fellow named Abraham Lincoln used it for his "House Divided Speech," saying that it, plus affairs in Kansas, proved a pro-slavery conspiracy encompassing Congress (which had passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise), the President (who was pushing a pro-slavery constitution for Kansas, even tho the majority of settlers there were anti-slavery) and the Court.

I do see signs of jury nullification in some cases, esp. where a slave owner sued someone he claimed had aided the slave's escape. And Dred Scott's Missouri attorney wrote his Washington DC one with a concern that the Court might be reluctant to accept a free black as a citizen, because then any alleged slave being held under the Fugitive Slave Act could invoke diversity jurisdiction, and get a jury trial. (The Fugitive Slave Act was incredibly draconian in terms of procedure. No jury. If the slave-State court issued a warrant for the arrest of the alleged slave, the receiving court was required to enforce it without further investigation. Of course, with no fingerprints or photo ID, it often had nothing but a general description to go by, or at most a slave owner or his agent saying that this fellow was an escaped slave. Any black in a free State was thus at constant risk of legal kidnapping. Oh, and if the judge found the person was free, the judge got only half the fee that he did if he found he was a slave. Seriously, that was the arrangement.)