Scott v. Sandford

Scott v. Sandford (1857). In the 1830s, Dr. John Emerson took his slave, Dred Scott, to the free state of Illinois and then to Fort Snelling, in Wisconsin territory (now Minnesota), where the Missouri Compromise had prohibited slavery. In 1846, Scott sued Emerson's widow to gain his freedom. A Missouri court freed him in 1850, ruling that he had become free while living in Illinois and at Fort Snelling. This decision conformed to a long line of earlier cases in Missouri, other states, and England. In 1852 the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the lower court, and in 1854 Scott took his case to the federal courts, suing his new owner, John Sanford (the name is misspelled “Sandford” in the official report of the case), under the clause in Article 3, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution that allows a citizen of one state to sue a citizen of another state in federal court. As a “citizen of Missouri,” Scott argued, he could sue Sanford, a New Yorker, in federal court. In opposing this suit, Sanford rejected Scott's claim to citizenship, “because he is a negro of African descent; his ancestors were of pure African blood, and were brought into this country and sold as negro slaves.”

Federal district judge Robert W. Wells ruled that if Scott were free he could sue as a citizen of Missouri. However, on the merits of the case, Wells held that Scott was still a slave. Scott then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in an aggressively proslavery majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney held that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because it deprived southerners of their property in slaves without due process of law or just compensation, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. Taney also denied that African Americans could ever be U.S. citizens. Ignoring that free black men in a number of states could vote when the Constitution was ratified, Taney declared that blacks were not included under the word “citizens” in the Constitution. According to him, blacks were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

This decision shocked many northerners, who had long seen the Missouri Compromise as a barrier against the expansion of slavery and a means of accommodating sectional differences. Abraham Lincoln attacked it in his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas and again during the 1860 presidential campaign.

The Lincoln administration and the Civil War Congress ignored the Dred Scott decision. During the war, Congress banned slavery in the western territories, and the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, declared all native‐born persons citizens of the United States and of the state in which they lived.
See also Antislavery; Bill of Rights; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Legislation; Civil War: Causes; Lincoln‐Douglas Debates; Race, Concept of; Racism.

Bibliography

Don E. Fehrenbacher , The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, 1978.
Paul Finkelman , Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents, 1997.

Paul Finkelman