Dred Scott v. Sandford

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Dred Scott v. Sandford

In the Dred Scott decision of 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, by a 7–2 vote, that free blacks were not citizens of the United States and that Congress lacked the power to prohibit slavery in the western territories.

Scott was a Virginia slave, born around 1802, who moved with his master, Peter Blow, to St. Louis in 1830. Blow subsequently sold Scott to Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon, who took Scott to Fort Armstrong in Illinois, a free state, and Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise. In 1846, after Emerson's death, Scott sued for his freedom (and that of his family). In 1850 a St. Louis court ruled that Scott became free by residing in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory. In 1852 the Missouri Supreme Court, articulating the South's proslavery ideology, rejected precedents of its own that went back more than twenty-five years and reversed the lower court decision:

Times are not as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made. Since then not only individuals but States have been possessed of a dark and fell spirit in relation to slavery, whose gratification is sought in the pursuit of measures, whose inevitable consequence must be the overthrow and destruction of our government.

Thus, Missouri would not recognize the freedom a slave might obtain by living in a free state.

In 1854 Scott began a new suit in United States District Court against John F. A. Sanford, a New Yorker who became the executor of Emerson's estate after Emerson's widow, the initial executor, remarried. Scott claimed he was a citizen of Missouri, suing Sanford in federal court because there was a diversity of state citizenship between the two parties. Sanford answered with a plea in abatement, arguing that no black, free or slave, could ever sue as a citizen in federal court. Federal District Judge Robert W. Wells ruled that if Scott was free, he was a citizen of Missouri for purposes of a diversity suit. However, Wells's ruling after the trial was that Scott was still a slave. Scott then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue was more than his status: The Missouri Supreme Court's decision challenged the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise. The central political issue of the 1850s—the power of the federal government to prohibit slavery in the territories—was now before the Supreme Court.

The ardently proslavery Chief Justice Roger B. Taney used Dred Scott v. Sandford (Sanford's name was misspelled by a clerk during the filing of the case) to decide this pressing political issue in favor of the South. Taney asserted that (1) the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because Congress could not legislate for the territories; (2) freeing slaves in the territories violated the Fifth Amendment prohibition on taking of property without due process; and (3) blacks, even those in the North with full state citizenship, could never be U.S. citizens. Taney asked: "Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities guaranteed by that instrument to the citizens?" Taney answered his own question in the negative. He asserted that at the nation's founding blacks were considered "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit." Taney thought his lengthy decision would open all the territories to slavery and destroy the Republican Party. In essence, he had constitutionalized racism and slavery. America, in Taney's view, was thoroughly a "white" nation.

Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis of Massachusetts protested Taney's conclusions. Curtis noted: "At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation [1781], all free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchises of electors, on equal terms with other citizens." Curtis concluded that when the Constitution was ratified, "these colored persons were not only included in the body of 'the people of the United States,' by whom the Constitution was ordained and established, but in at least five of the States they had the power to act, and doubtless did act, by their suffrages, upon the question of adoption." Curtis also argued that under a "reasonable interpretation of the language of the Constitution," Congress had the power to regulate slavery in the federal territories.

Northern Republicans and abolitionists were stunned and horrified. Horace Greeley, writing in the New York Tribune, called Taney's opinion "atrocious," "abominable," and a "detestable hypocrisy." The Chicago Tribune was repelled by its "inhuman dicta" and "the wicked consequences which may flow from it." Northern Democrats, on the other hand, hoped the decision would destroy the Republican Party by undermining its "free soil" platform and by finally ending the national debate over slavery in the territories. The New York Journal of Commerce hopefully declared that the decision was an "authoritative and final settlement of grievous sectional issues."

Ultimately, it was neither authoritative nor final. By 1858 northern Democrats faced a politically impossible dilemma. Their answer to the problem of slavery in the territories had been popular sovereignty—allowing the settlers to vote slavery up or down. But Taney's opinion denied both Congress and the settlers of a new territory the power to prohibit slavery. This made popular sovereignty meaningless. Stephen A. Douglas, the most prominent proponent of popular sovereignty, told his Illinois constituents that settlers could still keep slavery out of most of the territories by not passing laws that would protect slave property. This simply led to southern demands for a federal slave code for the territories and a split within the Democratic Party in 1860.

Republicans made Taney and the decision the focus of their 1858 and 1860 campaigns. Abraham Lincoln argued in his "house divided" speech (1858) that Taney's opinion was part of a proslavery conspiracy to nationalize slavery. He predicted "another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits." He told Illinois voters that "we shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their state free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state."

Justice Roger Taney

"We think they [Blacks] …are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States."

dred scott v. sandford, 60 u.s. 393 (1856).

Such arguments helped lead to a Republican victory in 1860. During the Civil War the Lincoln administration gradually reversed many of Taney's assertions about the status of blacks. This Republican policy culminated with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, which explicitly overruled Dred Scott, declaring, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

See also Slavery and the Constitution