[MUSIC] I now want to speak about slavery in the United States and its relationship to Magna Carta. The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment states, no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. As you will note, this links to the 39th clause of Magna Carta, which you can now read on the screen and begins, no Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned. And goes on to explain that justice should not be deferred. But we also know within Magna Carta there is also points about private property that clearly the Constitution is linking into. This sets up a dilemma in the 1800s for US lawmakers, and the dilemma is this. On the one hand, the rights of the individual are protected by both the Constitution and Magna Carta, but so are the rights of property ownership. What would happen if people could own people? Anti-slavery activists in the United States used the Constitution, and in particular highlighted the Fifth Amendment. This, of course, can be traced back to the due process clause in Magna Carta. But the problem is, as Justin Buckley Dyer of the University of Missouri has pointed out, what did "no person" mean in the United States in the first half of the 19th century? Were persons who were claimed as slaves entitled to legal protection of the type outlined in the Constitution? This question and others framed debates, and legal actions. So did slaves as persons have legal rights? Now, Chief Justice Marshall certainly thought so in 1825. When ruling in the case of the Antelope, he said it could scarcely be denied that slaves had legal rights under the Constitution. However, by 1842, another ruling by the same courts suggested that slaves were property and emphasised the rights of slave owners. Associate Justice Joseph Story, in Prigg versus Pennsylvania in that year said, it was positive and unqualified right on the part of the owner of the slave to own that slave. The problem was that when cases reached national courts, jurists were split. Fundamentally, often the cases were held in much more local state courts, and it really depended on whether the state was in support of slavery or not. And that leads us to actually the recognition that laws are made in cultural, historical contexts. They're not absolutes. They change over time. And at that time the United States was deeply divided over issues of race and rights. The even bigger problem in some of those cases, was that human beings were treated as property simply because of the color of their skin. A position that wouldn't hold. Frederick Douglass, the African-American social reformer, orator, writer said in 1854, let the engine of Magna Carta beat against Jericho's walls of slavery. And no seven days blowing of rams horn would be necessary. One historian has noted that Douglass has returned from touring England and Ireland where his knowledge of Magna Carta as a living document of struggle was refreshed by the English working class movement known at Chartism. Which opposed child labour, prison construction, in favor of land redistribution, female suffrage and the ten hour day. And Ireland became acquainted with the dire consequences of privatisation and famine. You can read more about this argument in Peter Linebaugh's Magna Carta Manifesto, Liberties and Commons for All. But this is not the end of the story. The next decision was even more dramatic by the courts. It's known as the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court ruled, amongst other things, that African-Americans having been considered inferior at the time of the Constitution being drafted, were not part of the original community of citizens. And whether free or slave could not be considered citizens of the United States. He also went on to say that at the time of the American founding, members of that unfortunate race had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations. And so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. It was a decision that would haunt the United States, and some historians would argue lead to the American Civil War when those states that were fundamentally opposed to slavery, came into conflict with those who supported it. The two different economies, the two different political situations lead to as we know now, the house divided. But it would also lead at the end of the American civil war, to the 13th amendment to the United States constitution in 1865, which would outlaw slavery.