John Umland says:

This book, Dred Scott’s Revenge, might have been interesting if Napolitano did not stray from facts and history and try to argue for state’s rights and secession in the Civil War. I thought I was reading a debate book by two authors talking past each other, but it was only one who would defeat himself over and over again trying to be a state’s right advocate and an anti-slavery, natural law advocate. The problem with natural law pleas is that what’s natural to one advocate is unnatural to the other. In response to “All men are created equal,” slavery advocates with popular science at their aid could say different races are almost different species and those whom they consider barely homo sapiens are not equal to themselves. Hence, when Lincoln was elected, slave states knew he would admit more free soil states and upend the balance of slave and abolitionist representation, making his view of Natural Law likely to prevail.

Napolitano’s defense of state secession ignores the example of West Virginia, which seceded from Virginia, and northern Alabama counties which unsuccessfully tried to secede. He also fails to mention voting fraud in many Confederate states that seceded even when the will of the voters was contrary. I highly recommend Bitterly Divided, which I blogged on, by David Williams.

The latter half of the book was good as it recounted the never ending depredations African-Americans endure, and sets Jeremiah Wright’s famous jeremiad in context.

What is Dred Scott’s revenge? I think it is the election of Barak Obama to the presidency. The author doesn’t actually say, but he is hopeful that Obama signals a post-racial America.
Rating: 1 / 5

Union65 says:

I give this book 1 star because it does a key historical figure grave injustice. Abraham Lincoln was neither a reluctant emancipator, nor a racist, nor a white supremacist, but a politician practicing the art of the possible. Really peruse, thru his Collected Works and other sources, his carefully-crafted words, and their context; and read Richard Striner’s “Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle Against Slavery”; LaWanda Cox’s “Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership”; and Harry Jaffa’s “Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates”.

Union and freedom were intertwined goals for Lincoln. Exigencies, timing, and public opinion had to be considered. And, it was Lincoln who pushed for the 13th Amendment, using all his influence to see it through Congress. Lincoln signed and supported the Freedmen’s Bureau bill–creating the first federal social welfare agency in American history. Furthermore, Lincoln approved of bills abolishing segregation on horse-drawn streetcars in D.C.; for allowing black witnesses in federal courts; for equalizing federal penalties for the same crime; African-Americans had picnics on White House grounds; he accepted an ambassador from Haiti; he approved equal pay for black soldiers; he invited African-American leaders to the White House for talks; colonization was urged to paliate whites hostile to Emancipation and because Lincoln knew white prejudice would not allow blacks to be “made” equal even when freed, and so they should “go where you are treated the best.” Nonetheless, colonization was to be voluntary. It was dropped when it was rejected. Lincoln, visiting occupied Richmond, Virginia in April 1865, doffed his hat and returned the bow of an elderly African-American gentleman–an act noted widely, and presaging a new relationship. Lincoln’s last (”last” being unknown to him) public address called for the vote to be given to African-American soldiers and the educated–J.W. Booth, in the crowd and sensing “N– citizenship”, vowed that that would be his last speech.

The man who Frederick Douglass called “Emphatically the Black Man’s president” in an 1865 speech, and about whom he said, “in all my interviews with Mr. Lincoln I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race”, is indeed the Great Emancipator.
Rating: 1 / 5