Scott v. Sandford

Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. (60 U.S.) 393 (1857), argued 11–14 Feb. 1856 and 15–18 Dec. 1856, decided 6–7 Mar. 1857 by vote of 7 to 2; Taney for the Court, Curtis and McLean in dissent. Scott v. Sandford (1857) stands as one of the most important cases in American constitutional history. It played a major role in precipitating the Civil War; it provided a basis for far‐reaching interpretations of substantive due process; and it stirred deep‐seated emotions in the saga of race relations in the United States.

Background

The Dred Scott Case began unobtrusively in 1846 in the lower state courts of Missouri. Born in Virginia, the slave Dred Scott moved with his master to St. Louis, where in 1833 he was sold to Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon. Emerson's military career subsequently took them both, among other places, to the free state of Illinois and to free Wisconsin Territory. While in Wisconsin, Scott married Harriet Robinson, whose ownership was transferred to Emerson. Meanwhile, during a tour of duty in western Louisiana in 1838, Emerson married Eliza Irene Sanford, whose family lived in St. Louis.

In 1842 the army posted Dr. Emerson to Florida, where the Seminole War was being fought. Mrs. Emerson and the family's slaves remained in St. Louis. In 1843, with hostilities winding down, Emerson rejoined his family, but he died shortly thereafter. The slaves continued to work for Mrs. Emerson, and, occasionally, as was common in urban servitude, they were hired out to others.

On 6 Apr. 1846, Dred and Harriet Scott instituted a suit for freedom against Irene Emerson in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County, under Missouri law. (Two separate but similar suits were filed. In 1850, to avoid costly duplication, only Dred Scott's case was pursued, with an agreement that its resolution would apply also to Harriet.) Although some details of the litigation's beginnings remain fuzzy, overwhelming evidence indicates that the slaves sued only for freedom and not, as some charged later, to challenge slavery‐oriented political issues. Indeed, based on numerous precedents in Missouri case law—the principal precedent being Rachael v. Walker (1837)—if a slave returned to Missouri, as Dred Scott had done, after having sojourned in a free state or territory, that slave was entitled to freedom by virtue of residence in the free state or territory. The established legal principle in Missouri was “once free, always free.” In fact, when the suit came to trial in 1847, Scott could have been emancipated had not a problem of hearsay evidence resulted in the judge ordering a mistrial. When the case was retried in 1850 and the problem corrected, the court unhesitatingly ordered Scott freed.

The three‐year delay before the second trial proved, however, to be fateful. Pending that trial, Scott's wages were held in escrow until the court determined whether he was free or slave. Meanwhile, Mrs. Emerson remarried, moved to New England with her new husband, and left her affairs in St. Louis in the hands of her businessman brother, John F. A. Sanford. When the court declared Scott free, the possible loss of his accumulated wages led Sanford, acting for his sister, to appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court seeking a reversal.

While the appeal was before the Missouri high court, events associated with the increasingly troublesome slavery issue transformed the litigation from a routine freedom suit to a cause célèbre. Asserting that “times now are not as they were” and defiantly exclaiming that Missouri law would not be dictated by antislavery outsiders, the Missouri Supreme Court in 1852 reversed the lower court, overturned numerous legal precedents, and in a manifestly partisan decision proclaimed controversial proslavery rhetoric as the law of Missouri, replacing the principle of “once free, always free” (Scott v. Emerson, 1852, p. 586).

The Federal Suit

To enable the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify to what degree, if at all, a state court could reverse the “once free, always free” principle, Scott's lawyers began a new suit, Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford, in the federal courts. (Through a clerical error, Sanford's name was misspelled in the court records.) Scott could have appealed directly from the Missouri Supreme Court to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the recent precedent of Strader v. Graham (1851) might have enabled the U.S. Supreme Court to endorse the state court decision without considering its merits. Mrs. Emerson's brother was named defendant because his New York residency made a federal diversity‐of‐citizenship case possible.

Sanford's attorneys injected additional issues into the federal litigation, including Scott's ability to sue in a federal court, raising the issue of a black person's claim to be a citizen of the United States. Equally troublesome was their proslavery challenge to the constitutionality of the 1820 Missouri Compromise. The power of Congress to forbid slavery in the territories had been long established but Sanford's attorneys now argued the extreme proslavery doctrine that slaves were private property protected by the United States Constitution and, therefore, that Congress could not abolish slavery in the territories. The issue was no longer whether Missouri could remand Dred Scott to slavery, but rather whether he had ever been free at all. So controversial and delicate were the issues that the Supreme Court requested parties to argue twice, a most unusual procedure, in February 1856 and again the following December.

At first it appeared that judicial restraint would prevail (see Judicial Self‐Restraint). With Strader v. Graham as a precedent, the Court was prepared to confirm the Missouri high court as having the final word on its own state law, with no need for the United States court to explore the merits separately. Justice Samuel Nelson was designated to write a Court opinion that would thus avoid any controversial, substantive slavery questions.

But the momentous forces of the time pressured the Court to resolve judicially what political institutions had been unable to do. Justice James M. Wayne of Georgia proposed that a new Court opinion deal with the issues that had until then been sidestepped. Though Wayne made the specific proposal, responsibility falls also on Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and Associate Justices John McLean, Benjamin R. Curtis and Peter V. Daniel. In conference a bare majority of five justices, all from slave states, approved the Wayne proposal, and Taney wrote a new opinion for the Court. Delivered on 6 March 1857, it became famous (or infamous) as the Dred Scott decision.

In its decision the Court divided 7 to 2 along ideological lines. Taney's opinion for the Court declared Scott to be still a slave for several reasons. First, although blacks could be citizens of a given state, they were not citizens of the United States having the concomitant right to sue in federal courts. Scott's suit was therefore dismissed because the Court lacked jurisdiction. Second, aside from not having the right to sue, Scott was still a slave because he had never been free in the first place. Congress exceeded its authority when it forbade or abolished slavery in territories because no such power could be inferred from the Constitution. Furthermore, slaves were property protected by the Constitution. The Missouri Compromise was accordingly declared invalid. Finally, whatever the status of an erstwhile slave might have been in a free state or territory, if the slave voluntarily returned to a slave state, his or her status there depended upon the law of that state as interpreted by its own courts. Since Missouri's high court had declared Scott to be a slave, that was the law that the U.S. Supreme Court would recognize.

Aftermath

The Supreme Court's decision triggered violent reaction, unleashing irreconcilable partisan passions that merged with other forces already building toward the coming national calamity. The press, the pulpit, the political stump, and the halls of Congress reverberated with scathing condemnations and vigorous defenses of the Court's action. Antislavery forces feared the next step, which might be to legalize slavery everywhere. They instituted a furious assault on the Court, charging that Taney's opinion was mostly obiter dictum, attacking the personal integrity of individual justices, and even suggesting a judicial proslavery conspiracy. The decision undermined the prestige of the Court just at the time when the stabilizing influence of a respected national judiciary might have provided the sound guidance so desperately needed. With the intrusion of the Court into the slavery issue, many felt that any compromise over slavery was now impossible, and the North and the South moved inexorably toward civil war.

American legal and constitutional scholars consider the Dred Scott decision to be the worst ever rendered by the Supreme Court. Historians have abundantly documented its role in crystallizing attitudes that led to war. Taney's opinion stands as a model of censurable judicial craft and failed judicial statesmanship. It took the Civil War and the Civil War Amendments to overturn the Dred Scott decision. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and all persons born in the United States, regardless of color or previous condition of servitude, were declared citizens of the United States by the Fourteenth Amendment. Unfortunately Dred Scott himself died in 1858, too soon to reap the benefits of those changes.

See also Citizenship; Comity; Judicial Power and Jurisdiction; Property Rights; Race and Racism; Territories and New States.

Bibliography

Walter Ehrlich , They Have No Rights: Dred Scott's Struggle for Freedom (1979).
Don E. Fehrenbacher , The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (1978).
David M. Potter , The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (1976).

Walter Ehrlich