Dred Scott Case

I

Introduction

Dred Scott Case, landmark case of the 1850s in which the Supreme Court of the United States declared that African Americans were not U.S. citizens. The Court also determined that the portion of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that banned slavery in U.S. territories north and west of the state of Missouri was unconstitutional. Officially titled Scott v. Sandford, the decision intensified ongoing debates over slavery that further polarized the American North and South and eventually gave rise to the American Civil War in 1861.

In 1846 Dred Scott, a slave living in St. Louis, Missouri, sued to prove that he, his wife, Harriet, and their two daughters were legally entitled to their freedom. After being tried in Missouri state courts and in a federal circuit court, the case went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856. The following year, the Court rejected Scott’s claim. Speaking for the Court, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney concluded that blacks, even when free, could never become citizens of the United States and thus did not have a right to sue in federal courts. Taney also declared that Congress lacked the power to prohibit slavery in federal territories, a ruling that invalidated the part of the Missouri Compromise that banned slavery in the western territories.

II

The Debate over Slavery in U.S. Territories

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case resulted from a long debate over slavery in the territories of the American West. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in all of the American territories north and west of the Ohio River. This region, called the Northwest Territory, consisted of land now occupied by the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the eastern portion of Minnesota.

In 1803 the United States purchased Louisiana from France. Most of this vast territory lay north and west of the southernmost point on the Ohio River. In 1819 Missouri applied to become a state. In the Congress of the United States Northerners argued that because most of Missouri was north and west of the Ohio River, it should prohibit slavery under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance. Southerners countered that the Northwest Ordinance only applied to those territories owned by the United States when the ordinance was ratified in 1787. Congress resolved the dispute with the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Under the compromise Missouri entered the Union as a slave state, Maine was split off from Massachusetts and entered the Union as a free state, and slavery was prohibited in all the federal territories north of the 36°30’ latitude, the southern boundary of Missouri.

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The Missouri Compromise helped defuse the issue of slavery in the territories until the mid-1840s, when Texas entered the Union and the United States went to war with Mexico. After the Mexican War (1846-1848) the question of slavery in the new western territories acquired from Mexico paralyzed Congress, until the Compromise of 1850 broke the deadlock.

In addition to adopting a new and harsh fugitive slave law, the Compromise of 1850 brought California into the Union as a free state, but allowed slavery in the rest of the territories. In 1854 Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This law partially repealed the Missouri Compromise by allowing the settlers of the Kansas and Nebraska territories (which included most of the present-day states of Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, South Dakota, and North Dakota) to decide for themselves if they wanted slavery. This was known as popular sovereignty. Those hostile to this law and other opponents of slavery responded by forming the Republican Party. Popular sovereignty soon degenerated into a civil war in Kansas—known as the Border War, or “Bleeding Kansas”—as Southerners and Northerners battled over the status of slavery.

By the time the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Scott v. Sandford case in 1856 the question of slavery in the western territories had become one of the most controversial issues in the country. The Court’s decision in the case was made in the context of the opening of western territories to slavery, the violence of the Border War, and the creation of a new political party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery into the West.

III

Dred Scott’s Life

Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia in about 1800. His owner, Peter Blow, moved to St. Louis in 1830, where he sold Scott to John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon. In 1836 Emerson and Scott moved to Fort Snelling, an army post in what is now Minnesota, and what was then in territory that banned slavery under the Missouri Compromise. At Fort Snelling, Scott married Harriet Robinson, who was also a slave. In 1837 Emerson left Fort Snelling for Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis. Scott and his wife stayed behind in Fort Snelling, but later joined Emerson in 1838. The Scotts eventually returned to St. Louis with Emerson in 1840.

In 1846, after Emerson died, Scott sued to gain freedom for himself, his wife, Harriet, and their two children. Scott argued that living at Fort Snelling had made him and his family free, and once free they remained free, even after returning to Missouri.

In January of 1850, a jury of 12 white men on the St. Louis Circuit Court concluded that Scott’s two years of residence in a free state and a free territory made him free. However, in 1852 the Missouri Supreme Court reversed this decision, claiming that due to Northern hostility toward slavery, Missouri would no longer recognize federal or state laws that might have emancipated Scott.

In 1854 Scott turned to the federal courts and renewed his quest for freedom in the U.S. Circuit Court in Missouri. Scott’s owner at this time was Emerson’s brother-in-law, John F. A. Sanford, who argued that blacks could never be citizens of the United States and therefore could never sue in federal court. (Due to a clerical error Sanford’s name was misspelled in court documents.) Federal Judge Robert Wells ruled that if Scott was free he was entitled to sue in federal court as a citizen. However, after a trial Wells decided Scott was still a slave.

IV

Scott’s Case in the Supreme Court

Scott then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court heard his case in the spring of 1856 but did not decide it that year. Instead, the Court ordered new arguments, to be conducted in December 1856, after the upcoming presidential election. Montgomery Blair, who would later serve as postmaster general in the Cabinet of President Abraham Lincoln, and George T. Curtis, brother of Supreme Court Justice Benjamin R. Curtis, represented Scott for free. U.S. Senator Henry S. Geyer of Missouri, and Reverdy Johnson, a Maryland politician and close friend of Chief Justice Taney, represented Scott’s owner. In March 1857 the Court ruled in a 7-to-2 decision that Scott was still a slave and therefore not entitled to sue in court. For the first time in history, each of the nine justices on the Court wrote an opinion in the same case, explaining their various positions on the Court’s decision.

Chief Justice Taney’s 54-page majority opinion of the Court had wide-ranging effects. In it he argued that free blacks—even those who could vote in the states where they lived—could never be U.S. citizens. At the time some or all adult black males could vote in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New York, and blacks had held public office in Ohio and Massachusetts. Nevertheless, Taney declared that even if a black was a citizen of a state, “It does not by any means follow . . . that he must be a citizen of the United States.” Taney based this unprecedented legal argument entirely on race. Although he knew that some blacks had voted at the time of the ratification of the Constitution of the United States in 1787, Taney nevertheless argued that blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution . . . On the contrary, they were at that time (1787) considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and . . . had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and Government might choose to grant them.”

In words that shocked much of the North, Taney declared blacks were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Taney concluded that blacks could never be citizens of the United States, even if they were born in the country and considered to be citizens of the states in which they lived. This also meant that Dred Scott had no right to sue for his freedom in a federal court.

Taney then turned to the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise. Many Republicans would later argue that Taney’s judgment on the Missouri Compromise was dicta—a statement made by a judge that is unnecessary to the outcome of the case. These critics asserted that if Dred Scott could not legally sue, then the case was not legally before the Court, and thus discussion of the Missouri Compromise was unnecessary to the decision and not legally binding.

Whether it was dicta or not, Taney discussed the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise and the debate over slavery in the territories. His goal was to finally settle the status of slavery in the territories in favor of the South. Ignoring the plain language of the Constitution, Taney argued that Congress did not have power to pass laws to regulate anything, including slavery, in the territories.

Taney also argued that any law that prohibited a master from taking a slave into the territories violated the Fifth Amendment, which protected the right to private property. Taney wrote that “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”