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Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)

In 1850 a Missouri trial court declared Dred Scott to be free because his late owner,
Dr. Emerson, had taken him to the free state of Illinois and later to Fort Snelling in
the Wisconsin Territory (present-day Minnesota), where Congress had prohibited
slavery under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. This decision was consistent with a
long line of Missouri cases dating from 1824 that held that residence in a free
jurisdiction led to the emancipation of a slave.

The Missouri Supreme Court reversed this result in Scott v. Emerson (1852), rejecting
its precedents because of the dark and fell spirit of abolitionism, which the court
claimed had taken over the North. In 1854 Scott began a new suit in federal court
against his new owner, John F. A. Sanford (his name is misspelled as Sandford in the
o cial report of the case). Scott sued on the basis of diversity of citizenship, claiming
he was a citizen of Missouri and noting Sanford was a citizen of New York.
Sanford denied Scotts right to sue him, arguing that because Dred Scott, is not a
citizen of the State of Missouri, as alleged in his declaration, because he is a negro of
African descent; his ancestors were of pure African blood, and were brought into this
country and sold as negro slaves.

United States District Judge Robert W. Wells rejected Sanfords theory, concluding
that if Dred Scott was free, then he could sue in federal court as a citizen of Missouri.
However, after hearing all the evidence, Wells charged the jury to uphold Scotts
slave status, based on the earlier Missouri decision that Scott was still a slave.

Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he lost in a 7-2 decision. In his
Opinion of the Court,Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that the Missouri
Compromise, under which Scott claimed to be free, unconstitutionally deprived
southerners of their property in slaves without due process of law or just
compensation, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. This decision shocked
northerners, who had long seen the Missouri Compromise as a central piece of
legislation for organizing the settlement of the West and for accommodating
di ering sectional interests.
Taney also denied that blacks could ever be citizens of the United States, rhetorically
declaring:

The question is simply this: 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, and privileges,
and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? One of which
rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases
specied in the Constitution.

Ignoring the right of free black men (in most of the northern states, as well as North
Carolina) to vote at the time of the ratication of the Constitution, Taney declared
that African-Americans

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 the instrument provides and secures to citizens of the
United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [17871788]
considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been
subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet
remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but
such as those who held the power and Government might choose to grant
them.

According to Taney blacks were so far inferior, that they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect.

Taneys opinion outraged many northerners, especially members of the new

Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln attacked the decision throughout his debates with
Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 and again during the presidential campaign of 1860. The
decision led many Republicans to support black citizenship and fundamental rights
for blacks, and others to argue for black equality and su rage.

The Lincoln Administration and the Civil War Congress ignored the decision, banning
slavery in all the western territories, despite Taneys assertation that such an act was
unconstitutional. In 1866 Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, which
declared that all persons born in the nation were citizens of the United States and of
the state in which they lived. The ratication of this amendment in 1868 made the
civil rights aspects of Dred Scott a dead letter. The decision nevertheless remains a
potent symbol of the denial of civil rights and the constitutionalization of racism
under the Constitution of 1787.