Supreme Court Issues Dred Scott Decision

Context

By the 1850s the expansion of slavery into western territories had become the central fault line in American politics. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had drawn a line at 36°30′ north latitude, prohibiting slavery in most of the Louisiana Purchase lands north of that parallel while permitting it to the south. That arrangement had held for more than three decades, allowing new states to enter the Union in balanced pairs and giving both sections a measure of security.

Dred Scott, born into slavery around 1799, had accompanied his owner, Army surgeon Dr. John Emerson, to postings in the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory in the 1830s. Under precedents followed by Missouri courts, prolonged residence in a free jurisdiction could confer freedom upon return to a slave state. When Emerson died, his widow retained ownership of Scott and his wife Harriet; antislavery lawyers in St. Louis saw the case as an opportunity to test those precedents on a larger stage.

The lawsuit began as a private freedom suit but quickly acquired national significance. As the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reopened the question of slavery in the territories and “Bleeding Kansas” erupted into violence, the Supreme Court’s eventual ruling was expected to settle, or at least clarify, the constitutional status of slavery in the West.

What Happened

Scott and Harriet filed separate petitions for freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court on April 6, 1846. After a mistrial and a second proceeding, a jury found them free in 1850. Irene Emerson appealed, and in 1852 the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the verdict, declaring that times had changed and Missouri would no longer honor the freedom granted by other jurisdictions.

The Scotts then brought a new federal suit in 1854 against John F. A. Sandford, Irene Emerson’s brother-in-law and the executor of her affairs, who resided in New York. The circuit court upheld Scott’s right to sue but ruled on the merits that he remained enslaved. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was argued in February 1856 and reargued in December. On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the majority opinion for seven justices. Taney held that persons of African descent, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens within the meaning of the Constitution and therefore could not sue in federal court. He further ruled that Congress possessed no authority to exclude slavery from the federal territories, rendering the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.

Justices Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean dissented, arguing that free Black Americans had been citizens in several states at the founding and that Congress’s territorial power was well established.

Aftermath

Northern reaction was swift and furious; the decision was denounced as a pro-slavery judicial coup that removed the last political restraints on slavery’s expansion. In the South the ruling was celebrated as a vindication of property rights. The Democratic Party fractured along sectional lines, while the Republican Party gained strength by campaigning against the decision and the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

Scott himself did not remain enslaved for long. In May 1857 members of the Blow family, his original owners, purchased him and his wife from Sandford and promptly manumitted them. Scott lived only a year longer, dying in St. Louis in 1858.

Legacy

Constitutional scholars have long regarded the Dred Scott decision as the Supreme Court’s most egregious overreach, a rare instance in which the Court attempted to resolve a profoundly political controversy through a sweeping constitutional pronouncement. Later Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it the Court’s great “self-inflicted wound.”

The ruling was overturned by the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; the Fourteenth declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens entitled to equal protection of the laws. In the decades that followed, the case stood as a cautionary example of the dangers of judicial activism on questions of fundamental rights and national policy.