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A landmark Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship and rights to people of African descent and upheld slavery in the U.S. territories. The decision was widely criticized for its racism, judicial activism, and role in the Civil War.
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Dred Scott was an enslaved person who accompanied his owner, an army physician, to postings in a free state (Illinois) and free territory (Wisconsin) before returning with him to the slave state of Missouri. In 1846 Scott and his wife, aided by antislavery lawyers, sued for their freedom in a St. Louis court on the grounds that their residence in a free territory had freed them from the bonds of slavery. Scott’s case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that he was not entitled to his freedom and, more broadly, that African Americans were not U.S. citizens.
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What was the Dred Scott decision?
The Dred Scott decision was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on March 6, 1857, that having lived in a free state and territory did not entitle an enslaved person, Dred Scott, to his freedom. In essence, the decision argued that, as someone’s property, Scott was not a citizen and could not sue in a federal court. The majority opinion by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney also stated that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories (thus invalidating the Missouri Compromise [1820]) and that African Americans could never become U.S. citizens.
How did the Dred Scott decision contribute to the American Civil War?
Dred Scott was a slave who was owned by John Emerson of Missouri. In 1833 Emerson undertook a series of moves as part of his service in the U.S. military. He took Scott from Missouri (a slave state) to Illinois (a free state) and finally into the Wisconsin Territory (a free territory). During this period, Scott met and married Harriet Robinson, who became part of the Emerson household. Emerson married in 1838, and in the early 1840s he and his wife returned with the Scotts to Missouri, where Emerson died in 1843.
Scott reportedly attempted to purchase his freedom from Emerson’s widow, who refused the sale. In 1846, with the help of antislavery lawyers, Harriet and Dred Scott filed individual lawsuits for their freedom in Missouri state court in St. Louis on the grounds that their residence in a free state and a free territory had freed them from the bonds of slavery. It was later agreed that only Dred’s case would move forward; the decision in that case would apply to Harriet’s case as well. Although the case was long thought to have been unusual, historians later demonstrated that several hundred suits for freedom were filed by or on behalf of slaves in the decades before the Civil War.
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Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s opinion for the court was arguably the worst he ever wrote. He ignored precedent, distorted history, imposed a rigid rather than a flexible construction on the Constitution, ignored specific grants of power in the Constitution, and tortured meanings out of other, more-obscure clauses. His logic on the citizenship issue was perhaps the most convoluted. He admitted that African Americans could be citizens of a particular state and that they might even be able to vote, as they in fact did in some states. But he argued that state citizenship had nothing to do with national citizenship and that African Americans could not sue in federal court because they could not be citizens of the United States. Scott’s suit, therefore, should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction by the district court. On this point, however, Taney stood on shaky constitutional ground: if even one state considered an African American a citizen, then the Constitution required that all states, and by inference also the federal government, had to accord that person “all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States” (Article IV, Section 2), which includes the right to sue in federal court. Furthermore, Article III, which establishes the jurisdiction of the federal courts, does not mention national citizenship but rather declares that “the judicial Power” shall extend, among other things, “to Controversies…between Citizens of different States” (the so-called “diversity jurisdiction”).
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Even with this weak argument, Taney could have been accused of nothing worse than faulty reasoning, if he had stopped there. If Scott was not a U.S. citizen, he could not sue in federal court, and the case would therefore have been improvidently granted. But Taney was determined to impose a judicial solution on the slavery controversy. Although later courts would adopt the policy of deciding constitutional questions on the narrowest possible grounds, the pre-Civil War courts often decided all issues that could support their rulings. Thus Taney continued, holding that Scott had never been free and that Congress had in fact exceeded its authority in the Missouri Compromise because it had no power to forbid or abolish slavery in the territories. The Missouri Compromise, which had served as the accepted constitutional settlement for nearly four decades, thus fell. Even the doctrine of popular sovereignty as articulated in the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)—whereby the people of each federal territory would have the power to decide whether the territory would enter the Union as a free or a slave state—lacked constitutional legitimacy, according to Taney. He thus voided the principles of free soil (opposition to slavery in the territories and in newly admitted states), territorial sovereignty, and indeed every aspect of antislavery constitutional thought.
Regarding the question of Scott’s freedom, Taney held that Scott could not claim to be free on the basis of his residence in Illinois or Wisconsin. Whatever status Scott might have had while in a free state or territory, he argued, once he had returned to Missouri his status depended entirely on local law, notwithstanding the doctrine of once free, always free.
Taney would have been on reasonably strong ground had he limited himself to upholding the district court’s decision based on the idea that status was to be determined by the states. Alternatively, he could have held that Scott was not entitled to sue Sanford in federal court on the basis of diversity of jurisdiction, because Missouri did not allow even free African Americans to be citizens. But Taney outraged much of the North by asserting that African Americans could never be citizens of the United States. The framers, in his view, did not regard African Americans as being among the “people” for whose benefit and protection the new government was founded, notwithstanding the perfectly general language of the Declaration of Independence and of the preamble to the Constitution.
Learn about the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that denied freedom to a slave and invalidated the Missouri Compromise. Find out how the decision fueled the sectional crisis and the Civil War.
Oct 27, 2009 · Learn about the long and controversial legal battle of Dred Scott, a Black enslaved man who sued for his freedom in multiple courts. Find out how the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him in 1857 and how the decision influenced the anti-slavery movement and the Civil War.
Jul 8, 2024 · The Supreme Court ruled that enslaved people were not citizens and Congress had no power to ban slavery in federal territories. This decision was overturned by the 13th and 14th amendments and sparked the Civil War.
Dred Scott was an enslaved African American man who sued for his freedom in the landmark case of Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857. The Supreme Court ruled against him, declaring that no person of African ancestry could be a citizen of the United States and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
Mar 6, 2012 · The Supreme Court ruled that former slaves were not U.S. citizens and could not sue in federal courts. The decision was based on the Constitution and the Dred Scott Act, and was later nullified by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
The Supreme Court ruled that African Americans were not citizens and could not sue in federal court, and that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in the territories. The decision was a major factor leading to the Civil War, but was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment.
