In 1857, the Supreme Court likely made one of the worst, if not the worst, decisions in its entire history in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, now commonly known as the Dred Scott case. It ruled that not only was slavery legal, but Black Americans were also not entitled to U.S. citizenship, regardless of whether or not they were enslaved. This court case is considered to be one of the major factors which caused the Civil War.
To understand this case well, we must first understand a little history. Back when slavery was legal, there had been major arguments over the ethicality, morality, and legality of slavery. Northern states, which were mainly industrial, saw slavery as an evil and wanted it abolished, while Southern states, having a farming- and plantation-based economy, wanted slavery to remain, even calling it a “necessary evil.” Some Southerners even argued that slavery was good for Black people.
Considering the North had most of the country’s cities, it was the most populous region of the country, and so Northerners mainly held control of the U.S. House. However, in order to avoid upsetting the slaveholding Southern states, steps were taken to ensure that there would always be the same number of slave and free states, so that the balance of power in the Senate (which granted two senators per state) would never tilt in favor of either side.
As America expanded, new states, such as those from the Louisiana Purchase, needed to be admitted to the Union. Northern free states wanted slavery to be outlawed in these new states, while the slaveholding South wanted slavery to be legal in these states to enhance their political and economic power.
In 1820, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, which hoped to resolve the dispute between the North and the South. It would create the new state of Missouri, which would be admitted as a slaveholding state, as well as the state of Maine, a free state, to maintain the balance of power in the Senate. Then, slavery would become illegal in all new states created above the 36th Parallel, which Missouri mainly lay above.
Now, back to the case. Dred Scott, a Black man, was born a slave in Virginia (a slaveholding Southern state) around 1799. In 1818, Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army doctor, purchased Scott and eventually moved him to Illinois and then the Wisconsin Territory by 1836. Slavery was already banned in Illinois, and pursuant to the aforementioned Missouri Compromise, slavery was outlawed in the territory.
In the Wisconsin Territory, Scott married another enslaved woman named Harriet Robinson, and Robinson was transferred to Emerson. Later, in 1837, Emerson moved to Louisiana, where he married Irene Sandford in 1838. The Scotts only joined the Emersons in Louisiana after their marriage; prior to this, they had been hired.
In October 1838, the Emersons took the Scotts along with them and moved back to Wisconsin Territory. After Emerson was discharged from the army in 1842, they then moved to Iowa, where John Emerson died a year later. Thus, the Scotts became the property of Irene and she moved to St. Louis with them.
In 1846, the Scotts attempted to purchase their freedom from Irene, but she refused. With the help of abolitionist advisers, in April 1846, Dred and Harriet Scott filed separate lawsuits in the St. Louis Circuit Court against Sandford. The Scotts sued Irene Sandford over two Missouri laws: one which allowed any person to sue for wrongful enslavement, and another which stated that a slave brought to a free territory automatically became free and could not be reenslaved even after returning to a slave state. (It is not known why the Scotts did not sue while they were in Wisconsin or Iowa, both free areas.)
Unfortunately, due to a technicality, the court ruled in favor of Emerson and a new trial had to be granted to the Scotts. In 1850, the court ruled in their favor and granted them freedom. However, Irene appealed the case to the Missouri Supreme Court, which ruled against the Scotts, enslaving the Scotts again.
The Scotts’ lawyers appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court in December 1854, after unsuccessfully suing in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Missouri. By this point, Irene had transferred the Scotts’ ownership to her brother, John Sandford.
The trial began on Feb. 11, 1856, and at this point, the case had gained national prominence and many abolitionists, including many Northern politicians and powerful attorneys, supported Scott.
Unfortunately, on March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney, a person born into the Southern aristocracy, and his court handed down the worst Supreme Court decision in the history of the United States (which, arguably, is probably still the worst Supreme Court decision ever in 2021). The majority opinion, which later defined Taney’s legacy, ruled against the Scotts and in favor of Sandford in a 7-2 decision.
The absolutely terrible decision came in a few parts. The first part said that all Black people, regardless of whether they were enslaved, were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, lacked the right to sue in federal court, since he believed that Blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” Thus, the case should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.
However, the citizenship issue was very convoluted. He admitted that even though African Americans could be citizens of individual states and could even vote in some, he argued that this had nothing to do with U.S. citizenship and that no Blacks could become citizens of the United States. This was a shaky argument, though, since Article Four, Section Two of the Constitution required that all states (and thus the federal government) had to accord that person “all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States,” even if just one state considered a Black a citizen. These privileges and immunities include the right to sue in federal court.
Although this would have usually concluded the case, Taney went on to assert that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because slaves, being the property of their owners, could not be freed from their owners without due process of law, as per the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees this right. Thus, this struck down the Missouri Compromise and became the first case since Marbury v. Madison to strike down a federal law.
Taney also wrote that Scott could not claim to be free simply because he lived in Illinois and Wisconsin in the past. Taney argued that once he had returned to a slave state or territory—Missouri in this case—his status depended entire on local law (which, in this case, meant he was a slave), thereby also striking down the “once free, always free” doctrine.
Not surprisingly, the two dissenting justices—John McLean and Benjamin Curtis—were both from the North (Ohio and Massachusetts respectively). They said that Taney’s argument that Blacks could not obtain U.S. citizenship was significantly flawed, considering in five of the original 13 states when the Constitution was ratified, Blacks could vote. In addition, many prior court cases supported the idea that once a slave was brought to a free state, he or she would forever be free. (Curtis’s dissent was so powerful that it convinced Taney to add 18 pages to his opinion to try and rebuke some of Curtis’s arguments.)
McLean said that the idea in which Blacks could not be citizens was “more of a matter of taste than of law,” and that if the court really found that it lacked jurisdiction over the case, it should have dismissed it, instead of penning an opinion for it. The dissenters also severely questioned the merits of overturning the Missouri Compromise.
Taney, along with then-President-elect James Buchanan, a Southern sympathizer, hoped that this case would quell all unrest over the issue of slavery. In fact, Buchanan went as far as to pressuring a Northern justice into joining the majority opinion in order to avoid the case to be decided along sectional lines.
The decision angered a great section of the American public living in the North. One person even said that the Dred Scott case was “greeted with unmitigated wrath from every segment of the United States except the slave holding states.” Clearly, the court and Taney did not see the extreme hostile reaction from the public against the court. Many members of the antislavery Republican Party, with Abraham Lincoln fast rising to power as the top Republican in Illinois, decried the decision as a plot to expand slavery to all free states, and that the entire federal government was under control of an evil “slave power.” Many, including famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, called the decision unconstitutional.
This argument over the government being controlled by a sinister “slave power” struck with many Northerners, and is ultimately one of the main causes of the Civil War.
Northern courts and politicians refused to accept Dred Scott v. Sandford as binding. In fact, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that all slaves which entered the state immediately became free and could not be reenslaved, a decision which the New York Court of Appeals also made later.
The South obviously commended the decision. Those in the South argued that the decision meant that opposition to slavery is now “morally treason against the government” and that slavery was constitutional.
Though Taney served a long term on the Supreme Court, he has been vilified for his decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, and is now remembered solely for it. When he died in 1864, Sen. Charles Sumner, R-Mass., said that “the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history,” a comment which probably aged well.
So, what happened to the Scotts? The Scotts were later freed by their new owner in 1857, but unfortunately, Dred Scott died of tuberculosis in St. Louis and never lived long enough to see slavery abolished. Harriet, however, lived until 1876, witnessing the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.
This court decision was later overturned by the 13th and 14th Amendments, passed after the North’s triumph in the Civil War, which forever outlawed “slavery and involuntary servitude” and gave citizenship to all people born in the United States respectively, regardless of other circumstances.