The United States created the Declaration of Independence to uphold morality. On top of the Declaration of Independence, other policies were created. One such type of policies were the military policies, which stated declarations of wars between foreign countries, protection of the nation, and the containment of communism. Another type of policy was civil rights where there were series of arguments about blacks’, women’s and immigrant’s rights. Crime was also another type of policy created that gave rights to citizens that were on trial and protected the nation from harm. Although the United States military, civil rights, and crime policies were created to uphold morality, they carried additional ulterior motives.
The United States military …show more content…
In 1857, a former black slave named Dred Scott sued for his freedom since he lived in a free state. Dred Scott’s case reached the supreme court in which Chief Justice Taney ruled that African Americans had no rights and that Dred Scott had to remain a slave, “According to the opinion of Chief Justice Taney, African Americans were ‘beings of an inferior order’ who ‘had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’ [...] His opinion raises questions about the extent to which his public pronouncement on the alleged inferiority of African Americans helped to establish conditions for the future of race relations in the United States” (Clark 6). Chief justice taney believed that people of color should not have the power that white people do. In the dred scott case, he ruled that african americans would never become citizens of america, giving them no rights whatsoever. This allowed whites to see themselves as the more dominant race while seeing the african americans as the inferior race. It allowed the continuation of discrimination and mistreatment of blacks. In 1915, the Grandfather Clause was added into registration law to give everyone the right to vote if a literacy test was passed. However, many blacks and poor white lacked education which prohibited them from voting, “The provision also stipulated that a lineal descendant of males in these categories, [white men], shall not be denied the right to register and vote because of their inability to read and write. The effect of the state constitutional provision was to prevent former male slaves and their descendants from voting,” (Jager 3). Intention was the grant african american men the ability to vote. However, only if they were literate enough, which most former black slaves were not able to have access to. It limited the uneducated who were mostly black men allowing the