The 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black Americans could not be U.S. citizens and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories.
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, was decided by the Supreme Court on 6 March 1857. Dred Scott, an enslaved man, had been taken by his enslaver, Dr. John Emerson, to live in the free state of Illinois and in Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was barred. Scott argued that residence on free soil had made him free. He and his wife, Harriet Scott, sued for freedom in St. Louis in 1846; the fate of their daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, rested on the case as well.
The litigation lasted more than a decade. Scott lost his first trial at St. Louis’s Old Courthouse in 1847 on a technicality of evidence, then won a jury verdict at a retrial in 1850. The Missouri Supreme Court reversed that verdict in 1852. In 1854 Scott’s lawyers brought a new suit in federal court against John Sanford, the brother of Emerson’s widow, and after losing there appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
By a vote of seven to two, the Court ruled against Scott. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s opinion held that people of African descent whose ancestors had been enslaved were not and could never be citizens of the United States, so Scott had no standing to sue in federal court. Taney went further. He declared that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the federal territories, rendering the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, and that residence in a free state or territory did not make Scott free. The opinion treated enslaved people as property entitled to federal protection rather than as persons with rights.
Intended to settle the slavery question, the decision instead inflamed it and helped bring on the Civil War four years later. Its central holdings were overturned by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which made all persons born in the United States citizens. It is remembered as one of the most discredited rulings in the Court’s history, and it set the stage for the constitutional revolution of Reconstruction.
See also: Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Plessy v. Ferguson
Sources
- National Archives, “Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).” Link
- National Park Service, “Dred Scott Case Trials.” Link
- Library of Congress, “Dred Scott v. Sandford: Primary Documents in American History.” Link
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