Vernellia Randall, 250 Years of White Supremacy Through Law: The Law Built the Foundation (1776–1865) (June 29, 2026)

The United States celebrates its founding in 1776 as the birth of liberty. Yet for millions of people, liberty was never the nation's first promise. From the beginning, American law created and maintained a racial hierarchy that placed White people at the top and everyone else below them, with anti-Black racism at its core.

This is not simply a story about prejudice. It is a story about the law—how constitutions, statutes, court decisions, treaties, and government policies transformed racial bias into a durable legal system that shaped the nation for generations.

That system determined who could become a citizen, who could own property, who could testify in court, who could vote, who could marry, who could receive an education, and who could expect the protection of the law. It defined who counted as fully American.

It also shaped how people became White. Many European immigrants—Irish, Italian, German, and others—did not arrive as fully accepted members of the dominant White culture. They often faced discrimination, suspicion, and exclusion. Over time, however, they gained acceptance by adapting their language, customs, and identities to align with dominant White American norms. This process of assimilation was not equally available to everyone. It was made possible in part because the law ultimately recognized them as eligible for citizenship and inclusion, reinforcing a racial boundary that remained closed to others.

This history is not abstract to me. My family lived under the laws I have spent my career studying.

On my father's side, my great-grandfather, M. R., was born into slavery in Missouri in 1845. His son, my grandfather T. R., was born five years after emancipation, in 1870, but entered a world where freedom existed more on paper than in daily life. My father, E. R., born in 1916, served his country during World War II in a segregated Army.

On my mother's side, my great-great-grandmother, K. C., was born enslaved in Texas in 1843. Her daughter, F. C., born around 1880, and my grandmother, M. M., born in 1893, lived under the tightening grip of Jim Crow. My mother, M. P. H., born in 1921, died in a segregated hospital ward in Pennsylvania in 1957.

My family also includes White and Native ancestors. Their stories reflect the complexity of American history. Families often crossed legal and racial boundaries that the law itself tried to enforce. Yet those connections did not weaken the system of racial hierarchy. If anything, they reveal how determined the law was to preserve it.

My family's story was not unique. Across the country, millions of people found that their opportunities, their rights, and even their identities were shaped not simply by custom or prejudice, but by law. The Constitution and the legal system that followed established the framework for that racial hierarchy.

The Constitution itself reflected that determination.

Although the word "slavery" never appears in the Constitution, the document repeatedly protected the institution. The Three-Fifths Clause increased the political power of slaveholding states by allowing enslaved people to be counted for representation while denying them every right of citizenship. The Fugitive Slave Clause required the return of people who escaped slavery. Congress was prohibited from banning the international slave trade before 1808.

These were not accidental compromises. They were deliberate political bargains that strengthened slavery and helped secure the Constitution's ratification.

Congress quickly reinforced that constitutional foundation.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalized citizenship to "free White persons." From the nation's earliest years, federal law made clear that becoming American was tied to being White.

Congress also enacted the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. The 1850 law was especially severe. It required federal officials to assist in capturing people accused of escaping slavery, denied the accused basic legal protections, and punished those who helped them. In effect, it turned the entire nation into an enforcement arm of slavery.

The Supreme Court played a central role as well.

Its most infamous decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857 held that people of African descent could not be citizens of the United States and therefore could not claim constitutional protections. The Court also ruled that Congress lacked the authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories.

Today, Dred Scott is widely condemned. But at the time, it reflected decades of legal thinking that placed Black people outside the nation's political community. The decision did not create racial hierarchy—it affirmed and legitimized one that lawmakers had been building for generations.

Other communities experienced their own forms of legal discrimination during this period.

Native Nations were displaced through broken treaties, military conquest, and federal removal policies that culminated in the Trail of Tears. At the same time, the Supreme Court and Congress developed legal doctrines that recognized tribes as distinct political communities while increasingly limiting their sovereignty and placing them under federal authority.

Mexican Americans living in the territories acquired after the Mexican-American War faced a different legal reality. The war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which Mexico ceded more than half of its territory to the United States. Years later, President Ulysses S. Grant, who had fought in the war as a young Army officer, described it as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." The treaty promised the Mexican residents of the ceded territory United States citizenship and protection of their property rights. In practice, many of those promises were ignored, narrowly interpreted, or undermined, leaving countless Mexican Americans dispossessed of their land and denied the full legal protections the treaty was intended to guarantee.

Chinese immigrants would later face exclusionary laws rooted in legal principles established during these early decades.

Different communities experienced different forms of oppression. Yet these laws shared a common purpose: preserving a racial hierarchy in which White Americans held political power, economic opportunity, and legal protection unavailable to others.

Understanding this history matters because it challenges one of America's most enduring myths. We often tell ourselves that slavery and racial discrimination were unfortunate departures from the nation's commitment to liberty and equality. The historical record tells a different story. For nearly a century, racial hierarchy was not a failure of American law—it was one of its defining purposes. Constitutions, statutes, treaties, and court decisions did not merely tolerate inequality; they gave it legal force.

By 1865, slavery had been abolished, and the nation stood at a crossroads. The question was no longer whether slavery would survive, but whether the United States would finally create a legal system based on equal citizenship. For a very brief moment, that possibility seemed within reach.

This five-part series includes:

• Essay 1: The Law Built the Foundation (1776–1865)
• Essay 2: Reconstruction: America's First Attempt at Equal Citizenship (1865–1877)
• Essay 3: Jim Crow: The Law Rebuilds Racial Hierarchy (1877–1964)
• Essay 4: From Civil Rights to Colorblindness (1964–2016)
• Essay 5: The Trump Era (2016–Present)

 Vernellia R. Randall, Professor Emerita of Law, University of Dayton School of Law. This article was drafted with the assistance of ChatGPT, an AI language model.