Dred Scott Case

The case of Dred Scott v. Sandford reached the Supreme Court in March 1857. By a vote of seven to two, the Court ruled that black people - either free or enslaved - were not citizens of the United States and, therefore did not have the right to sue in a federal court. Dred Scott thus would have to remain enslaved, subject to the laws of the state of Missouri...Southerners rejoiced at the Dred Scott decision, which opened all territories to slavery. The North was outraged at the decision. The Republican party had dedicated itself to preventing the extension of slavery. Now, it seemed, slavery could be extended throughout the territories.

Sectional Divisions Grow

Despite Buchanan’s determination to adopt policies that would calm the growing sectional strife in the country, a series of events helped drive Americans in the North and South even further apart.

The Dred Scott Decision

In his March 1857 inaugural address, James Buchanan suggested that the nation let the Supreme Court decide the question of slavery in the territories. Most people who listened to the address did not know that Buchanan had contacted members of the Supreme Court and therefore knew that a decision was imminent.

Many Southern members of Congress had quietly pressured the Supreme Court justices to issue a ruling on slavery in the territories. They expected the Southern majority on the court to rule in favor of the South. They were not disappointed. Two days after the inauguration, the Court released its opinion in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. (see page 1080 for more information on Dred Scott v. Sanford.)

Dred Scott was an enslaved man whose Missouri slaveholder had taken him to live in free territory before returning to Missouri. Assisted by abolitionists, Scott sued to end his slavery, arguing that the time he had spent in free territory meant he was free. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the majority opinion in the case. Taney ruled against Scott because, he claimed, African Americans were not citizens and therefore could not sue in the courts. Taney then addressed the Missouri Compromise’s ban on slavery in territory north of Missouri’s southern border:

“It is the opinion of the court that the Act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning [enslaved persons] in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned is not warranted by the Constitution and is therefore void.”
--from Dred Scott v. Sanford
Instead of removing the issue of slavery in the territories from politics, the Dred Scott decision itself became a political issue that further intensified the sectional conflict. The Supreme Court had said that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in the territories. Free soil, one of the basic ideas uniting Republicans, was unconstitutional.

Democrats cheered the decision, but Republicans condemned it and claimed it was not binding. Instead they argued that it was an obiter dictum, and incidental opinion not called for by the circumstances of the case. Southerners, on the other hand, called on Northerners to obey the decision if they wanted the South to remain in the Union.

Many African Americans, among them Philadelphia activist Robert Purvis, publicly declared contempt for any government that could produce such an edict:

“Mr. Chairman, look at the facts – here, in a country with sublimity of impudence that knows no parallel, setting itself up before the world as a free country, a land of liberty!, ‘the land of the free, and the home of the brave,’ the ‘freest country in all the world’…and yet here are millions of men and women…bought and sold, whipped, manacled, killed all the day long.”
--quoted in Witness for Freedom

Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) was decided before the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment provides that anyone born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen of the nation and of his or her state. In this case, the Supreme Court held that a slave was property, not a citizen, and thus had no rights under the Constitution. The decision was a prime factor leading to the Civil War.

Dred Scott, an illiterate Missouri slave, was taken by his master for several years (1834-1838) to the free state of Illinois and then to a portion of Wisconsin Territory now located in the state of Minnesota. The Minnesota area was then free territory, since it lay north of the line of 36 30’ established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (subsequently repealed in 1854). Scott, taken in hand by interested abolitionists, sued for his freedom on the grounds of residence on free soil. The case was appealed from the circuit court to the Supreme Court, which grappled with several basic questions: Was a slave a citizen under the Constitution? (If not, he was not entitled to sue in federal courts.) Was Dred Scott rendered free by residence in Wisconsin Territory, under the terms of the Missouri Compromise? The Court, headed by the pro-Southern Chief Justice Roger Taney of the slaveholding state of Maryland, ruled as follows.

On March 6, 1857, in a small room in the Capital basement, the Supreme Court finally decided a question that Congress had evaded for decades: whether Congress had the power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Repeatedly, Congress had declared that this was a constitutional question that the Supreme Court should settle.

The case originated in 1846, when a Missouri slave, Dred Scott, sued to gain his freedom. Scott argued that while he had been the slave of an army surgeon, he had lived for four years in Illinois, a free sate, and Wisconsin, a free territory, and that his residence on free soil had erased his slave status. In 1850 a Missouri court gave Scott his freedom, but two years later, the Missouri supreme court reversed this decision and returned Scott to slavery. Scott then appealed to the federal courts.

For five years, the case proceeded through the federal courts. It was argued before the Supreme Court in 1856, at precisely the time that Senator Charles Sumner was delivering his bitter attack on the slave power, “The Crime against Kansas.”

By a 7-2 margin, the Court ruled that Dred Scott had no right to sue in federal court, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that Congress had no right to exclude slavery from the territories.

All nine justices rendered separate opinions, but Chief Justice Taney delivered the opinion that expressed the position of the Court’s majority. His opinion represented a judicial defense of the most extreme proslavery position.

The chief justice made two sweepings rulings. The first was that Dred Scott had no right to sue in federal court because neither slaves nor fee blacks were citizens of the United States.

Second, Taney declared that Congress had no right to exclude slavery from federal territories since any law excluding slavery property from the territories was a violation of the Fifth Amendment prohibition against the seizure of property without due process of law. For the first time since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional.

In a single decision, the Court sought to resolve all the major constitutional questions raised by slavery. It declared that the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were not intended to apply to African Americans. It stated that the Republican party platform – baring slavery from the western territories – was unconstitutional. And it ruled that Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty” – which stated that territorial governments had the power to prohibit slavery – was also unconstitutional.

Radical abolitionists called for secession. Many Republicans – including an Illinois politician named Abraham Lincoln – regarded the decision as part of a slave power conspiracy to legalize slavery throughout the United States.

The Dred Scott decision was a major political miscalculation. In its ruling, the Supreme Court sought to solve the slavery controversy once and for all. Instead the Court intensified sectional strife, undercut possible compromise solutions to the divisive issue of the expansion of slavery, and weakened the moral authority of the judiciary.

Like the Compromise of 1850, which was intended to put the section conflict to rest once and for all, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act that was to enshrine the principle of non-intervention as the definitive solution to the territorial issue, the Dred Scott decision failed to accomplish what was expected of it. It annulled a law that had been repealed three years earlier and denied freedom to slaves in an area in which there were no slaves. The decision also placed obstacles in the way of sectional adjustment by stiffening southern extremist demands for constitutional protection. It also strengthened the arguments of those in the South who claimed that territorial popular sovereignty – the ability of a territorial legislature to prohibit slavery – was unconstitutional. That is, Congress cannot delegate a power which is unconstitutional and which it does not possess to the territorial legislature, itself a creature of Congress (Fehrenbacher 1978: 456-7).  

Most importantly, Dred Scott reinforced the belief among northern restrictionists that an aggressive slaveocracy was conspiring to impose slavery first on the territories and ultimately on the nation. By essentially declaring that freedom was local to those states that had abolished it and that slavery could expand anywhere it was not specifically banned, the Court put itself in the indefensible position of pitting the constitutional against the basic American values of liberty and equality. Simply put, under the whip of slaveholders the Court had converted the charter of freedom into a safeguard of slavery.

The South took the offensive at the very outset of the Buchanan administration. Its instrument was the Supreme Court, which had a majority of five justices from slave states led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland. Those justices saw the Dred Scott case as an opportunity to settle once and for all the question of slavery in the territory.

After the owner’s death, Scott sued for freedom on the grounds of his prolonged stay in Wisconsin Territory, where slavery had been outlawed by the Missouri Compromise. The case worked its way up from Missouri courts through a federal circuit court to the U.S. Supreme Court. There it began to attract attention as a test case of Congress’s power to prohibit slavery in the territories.

The southern Supreme Court justices decided to declare that the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in the territories was unconstitutional. But to avoid the appearance of a purely sectional decision they sought the concurrence of at least one northern Democratic justice. They found their man in Robert Grier of Pennsylvania, and President-elect Buchanan played an improper role by pressing his fellow Pennsylvanian to go along with the southern majority. Having obtained Justice Grier’s concurrence, Chief Justice Taney issued the Court’s ruling stating that Congress did not have the power to keep slavery out of a territory, because slaves were property and the Constitution protects the right of property. For good measure, Taney also wrote that the circuit court should not have accepted the Scott case in the first place, since black men were not citizens of the United States and therefore had no standing in its courts. Five other justices wrote concurring opinions. The two non-Democratic justices (both former Whigs, one of them now a Republican) dissented vigorously from both parts of the Court’s decision. They stated that blacks were legal citizens in several northern states and were therefore citizens of the United States. And to buttress their opinion that Congress could prohibit slavery in the territories, they cited the provision of the Constitution giving Congress power to make “all needful rules and regulations” for the territories.

Modern scholars agree with the dissenters. But in 1857 Taney had a majority and his ruling became law.

Dred Scott was a slave born in Virginia at the turn of the century and in 1818 had moved with his master, Peter Blow, to a cotton plantation in Alabama. Twelve years later, the Blow family and their six slaves moved to St. Louis. In 1833, Scott was sold to Dr. John Emerson, an army doctor who took Scott with him as his personal servant to Fort Armstrong, Illinois. Two years later, Scott accompanied Emerson when he was transferred to Fort Snelling on the Minnesota River in Wisconsin Territory. Other moves followed, but in a few years Emerson returned Scott to St. Louis. On April 6, 1846, Dred Scott sued to prove that he, his wife Harriet, and their two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, were legally entitled to their freedom. Dred Scott’s claim was based on his travels and residences. He argued that living in Illinois, a free state, and in Wisconsin Territory, a free territory according to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, had made him and his family free; and once free, they remained free, even after returning to Missouri, a slave state.

Eleven years after the Scotts first sued for freedom, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case. The justices could have simply settled the immediate issue of Scott’s status as a free man or slave, but they saw the case as an opportunity to settle once and for all the vexing question of slavery in the territories. On the morning of March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the majority decision of the Court. Taney hated Republicans and detested racial equality, and the Court’s decision reflected those prejudices. First, the Court ruled that Dred Scott could not legally claim violation of his constitutional rights because he was not a citizen of the United States. At the time of the Constitution, Taney said, blacks “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order…so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Second, the laws of Dred Scott’s home state, Missouri, determined his status, and thus his travels in free areas did not make him free. Third, Congress’s power to make “all needful rules and regulations” for the territories did not include the right to prohibit slavery. The Court then explicitly declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, even though it had already been voided by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Republicans exploded in outrage. Taney’s extreme proslavery decision ranged far beyond a determination of Dred Scott’s freedom. By declaring unconstitutional the Republican program of federal exclusion of slavery in the territories, the Court had cut the ground from beneath the party.

The Republican rebuttal to Taney’s decision relied heavily on the brilliant dissenting opinion of Justice Benjamin R. Curtis. Scott was a citizen of the United States, Curtis argued. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, free black men could vote in five states and participated in the ratification process. Scott was free: Because slavery was prohibited in Wisconsin, the “involuntary servitude of a slave, coming into the Territory with his master, should cease to exist.” And the Missouri Compromise was constitutional. The Founders meant exactly what they said: Congress had the power to make “all needful rules and regulations” for the territories, including barring slavery.

But what southern Democrats cheered, northern Democrats found profoundly disturbing. They feared that the Dred Scott decision annihilated not just the Wilmot Proviso but popular sovereignty as well. If Congress did not have the authority to exclude slavery, how could Congress’s creation, a territorial government, assume that right?

By draining the last drop of ambiguity out of popular sovereignty, the Dred Scott decision jeopardized the ability of the Democratic Party to hold its northern and southern wings together.

Ironically, the Dred Scott decision strengthened the young Republican Party by giving credence to its claim that a hostile Slave Power conspired against northern liberties.
   
As for Dred Scott, although the Court rejected his suit, he did in the end gain his freedom. In May 1857, Taylor Blow, the son of his first owner, purchased and freed Dred Scott and his family. On September 17, 1858, Dred Scott died in obscurity.

Why was the Dred Scott decision important?

One of the most important and controversial Supreme Court decisions in American history was the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Dred Scott was an enslaved African who had been taken to the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory and, later, back to Missouri, a slave state. In 1846 Scott sued the man who held him in servitude on the grounds that he had achieved his freedom by residing in free territory. When the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against him, Scott sued in the federal Circuit Court in Missouri. When that court also ruled against him, Scott’s attorney appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Robert Taney wrote the Court’s opinion, which reached several conclusions. Two were explosive in their significance:

On March 6, 1857, two days after the inauguration, the Supreme Court rendered a decision in the long-pending case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.

After his master’s death in 1843 Scott apparently had tried to buy his freedom. In 1846, with help from white friends, he brought suit in Missouri courts claiming that residence in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory had made him free. A jury decided in his favor, but the state supreme court ruled against him.

Each of the nine justices filed a separate opinion, except one who concurred with Chief Justice Robert B. Taney of Maryland. By different lines of reasoning, seven justices ruled that Scot remained a slave. The aging Taney, whose opinion represented the Court, ruled that Scott lacked legal standing because he lacked citizenship. Taney argued that one became a federal citizen either by birth or by naturalization, which ruled out any former slave. He further argued that no state had ever accorded citizenship to blacks – a statement demonstrably in error.

To clarify further the definition of Scott’s status, Taney moved to a second major question. Residency in a free state had not freed Scott since, in line with precedent, the decision of the state court governed. This left the question of residency in a free territory. On this point, Taney argued that the Missouri Compromise had deprived citizens of property in slaves, an action “not warranted by the constitution.”

The upshot was that the Supreme Court had declared an act of Congress unconstitutional for the first time since Marbury v. Madison (1803), and a major act for the first time ever. Congress had repealed the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas-Nebraska Act three years earlier, but the decision now challenged popular sovereignty. If Congress itself could not exclude slavery from a territory, then presumably neither could a territorial government created by act of Congress.

By this decision the Supreme Court had thought to settle a question that Congress had dodged ever since the Wilmot Proviso surfaced. But far from settling it, it had only fanned the flames of dissension.  Little wonder that Republicans protested: the Court had declared their program unconstitutional. It had also reinforced the suspicion that the slavocray was hatching a conspiracy. Were not all but one of the justices who joined Taney southerners?

(Actually, Buchanan already knew the outcome because two other justices had spilled the beans in private letters.) Besides, if Dred Scott were not a citizen and had no standing in court, there was no case before it. The majority ruling was an obiter dictum – a statement not essential to deciding the case and therefore not binding, “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority to have congregated in any Washington bar-room.”

Proslavery elements, of course, greeted the Court’s opinion as binding. Now the fire-eaters among them were emboldened to yet another demand. It was not enough to deny Congress the right to interfere with slavery in the territories; Congress had an obligation to protect the property of slaveholders, making a federal slave code the next step.

On March 6, 1857, a divided Supreme Court announced its landmark Dred Scott decision. A narrow majority held that slave or free, blacks were not American citizens and therefore could not sue in American courts. Furthermore, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, himself a former slaveholder, announced that Congress had no lawful power to prohibit slavery in federal territories. To [William Lowndes] Yancy and virtually all white southerners, this decision settled the territorial question once and for all, and in their favor; it simply stated what most had argued at least since the Missouri Compromise in 1820. To northerners, Republicans in particular, the case struck at the heart of their values and their party creed. James Buchanan stood foursquare behind the decision, earning him praise and respect from white southerners and suspicion and ignominy from fellow northerners.

In March 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of slavery in the case of a slave named Dred Scott. Scott claimed his freedom because his owner had moved him from a slave state (Missouri) to a free state (Illinois). U.S. Chief Justice Roger Taney held that a slave, ex-slave, or descendant of a slave was not an American citizen, but the property of an owner. Because Congress was constitutionally required to protect property, it could not prohibit slavery in the territories. Thus the slave owner’s constitutional rights to liberty and property under the law superseded the freedom of the slave, who was not a citizen, but a thing. Anti-slavery men and women everywhere were outraged.

[Horace] Greeley wrote that Taney’s decision carried as much moral weight as a majority vote in “any Washington bar room.” The decision was bad law, “southern sophism cloaked with the dignity of our highest court.” Slaves might be sold on Bunker Hill and in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston, while slave ships might now “land their dusky cargo at Plymouth Rock.” The Dred Scott decision was a collection of “false statements and shallow sophistries” put together to support a foregone conclusion, and a “fatal blow to the rights and liberties of all.” Even the individual states could only establish and strengthen slavery within their borders. The Dred Scott case, wrote Greeley, meant that “the Star of Freedom and the stripes of bondage are henceforth one. American Republicanism and American Slavery are for the future synonymous.”