Amendments was ''the freedom of the slave race. S4.1Overview of Public Debt Clause. Amdt14.Scott, a slave, argued that he was free because his owner had taken him to territory where slavery was banned. The conspicuous exception to this was the holding in the Dred Scott case that former slaves, as non-citizens, could not claim the protections of the clause. Sandford (1857), which had held that Americans descended from African slaves could not be U.S. citizens. Men, at that time, both in England and in America, looked upon the slave trade as the life of slavery. That amendment declared that all persons in the United States should be free. The Journal of Business Diversity; West Palm Beach Vol. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 heightened the threat that free people would be kidnapped and illicitly sold as slaves. We are not treating the former slaves with the same kind of generosity that we once treated slave masters, and that's hypocrisy.