From Wikipedia: Gag rule (United States)

A restriction on congressional speech in the mid 19th Century.

- Click here for the entry.

In United States history, the gag rule was a series of rules that forbade the raising, consideration, or discussion of slavery in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1836 to 1844.

Congress regularly received petitions asking for various types of relief or action. Before the gag rules, House rules required that the first thirty days of each session of Congress be devoted to the reading of petitions from constituents. Each petition was read aloud, printed, and assigned to an appropriate committee, which could choose to address or ignore it. After those thirty days, petitions were read in the House every other Monday.

This procedure became unworkable in 1835, when, at the instigation of the new American Anti-Slavery Society, petitions arrived in Congress in quantities never before seen. Over the gag rule period, well over 1,000 petitions, with 130,000 signatures, poured into the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate praying for the abolition or the restriction of that allegedly beneficial "peculiar institution", as it was called in the South. There was a special focus on slavery in the District of Columbia, where policy was a federal, rather than state, matter. The petitions also asked Congress to use its Constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce to end the interstate slave trade, The petitions were usually presented by former president John Quincy Adams, who as a member of the House of Representatives from strongly anti-slavery Massachusetts, identified himself particularly with the struggle against any Congressional abridgement of the right of citizens to petition the government.

The pro-slavery forces controlled Congress. The faction responded with a series of gag rules that, much to the disgust of Northerners, automatically "tabled" all such petitions, prohibiting them from being printed, read, discussed, or voted on. "The effect of these petitions was to create much irritation and ill feeling between different parts of the Union."

  

Did "We the People" apply to African- Americans at the time of the founding?

A great question.

Justice Clarence Thomas is not certain that it did:

“There was always this underlying belief that we were entitled to be a full participant in ‘we the people,’ ” Thomas told a crowd at the National Archives last week.
“That’s the way we grew up. It was the way the nuns, who were all immigrants, would explain it to us — that we were entitled, as citizens of this country, to be full participants. There was never any doubt that we were inherently equal. It said so in the Declaration of Independence.”

Click here for the video of an interview with Thomas.

Catch up on commentary here, and here.

Some critics of originalism have argued that the original Constitution was illegitimate because it excluded blacks. There is little doubt that the original Constitution tolerated severe racial injustices, most notably slavery. But there is nonetheless a difference between a Constitution that left slavery and other injustices alone (in part because abolition was politically impossible at the time), and one that categorically denied all blacks any “rights which the white man was bound to respect,” as [Roger] Taney put it.

The Most Influential Novel Ever Written by an American: Uncle Tom's Cabin

So says the author of Mightier than the Sword. This is useful to consider in the section on Freedom of the Press and the influence of the media in general. In fact, it would be useful to add content to class material that walked through history tying govermental actions with popular novels of the time.

Offer candidates if you will. Regarding Uncle Tom's Cabin (quote lifted from The Dish):

The heart of the book covers the debates over race, slavery, and the extent to which Uncle Tom's Cabin—or any novel, for that matter—can be said to "change" history. Reynolds argues vehemently in favor of fiction's ability to do so, and he makes a very good case for it. In fact, Reynolds takes the argument for the powerful impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin to greater lengths than any previous critic. If at times he might be said to exaggerate, I think his basic point is accurate: yes, the novel has probably had a more profound effect, and has spurred more reaction, both positive and negative, than any other book in American history. Reynolds has always been one to go to painstaking lengths in supporting such assertions. His analysis of the deeply racist underpinnings of the culture, extending on into the early and middle parts of the 20th century, and his coverage of the abolitionist debates, while not surprising for experts in the field, are nonetheless excellent.
It wasn't always well regarded.

Was Abraham Lincoln really a vampire killer?

That's your call, but we briedly discussed the new movie in one of the classes yesrterday. Then I stumbled across this story which claims that slaves were concerned that southern slave masters were cannibals and - yes - vampires.

Slaves in the colonial era created a complex folklore about the southern master class, worrying that slave traders were cannibals. My research uncovered at least one case in Louisiana which newly imported slaves became convinced that the masters were witches and vampires (after watching them drink red wine).

These tales of terror illuminate rather than obscure important truths. Slavery did represent a kind of dark magic in which legal fictions transmogrified the bodies of human beings into property. The institution of slavery did become a kind of cannibalism, swallowing millions from the African continent, digesting them in the rice and cotton fields in the relentless pursuit of wealth that characterized the alleged southern "aristocrats."

America needed a vampire hunter in 1860. 

Judges and Diversity

Jeffrey Toobin reminds us that diversity has always played a role in deciding who to appoint to the Supreme Court. At one point, it was regional diversity, now its gender and race. That's the only thing that's changed.