DRED SCOTT CASE

DRED SCOTT CASE (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 1857). In 1846, the slave Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued Irene Emerson, the widow of Scott's former owner, Dr. John Emerson, a surgeon in the U.S. Army. Scott claimed he was free because Dr. Emerson had taken him from the slave state of Missouri to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory (present-day Minnesota), where Congress had prohibited slavery under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Scott also claimed to be free because Emerson had taken him to the free state of Illinois.

In 1850, a Missouri trial court declared Scott a free man based on the theory that he had become free while living at Fort Snelling and in Illinois, and that he had the right to continue being free. However, in 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned Scott's victory. In 1854, Scott sued his new owner, John F. A. Sanford, in federal court (Sanford's name is misspelled as Sandford in the official report of the case). Scott sued under a clause in Article III of the U.S. Constitution, which states that a citizen of one state may sue a citizen of another state in federal court. Scott argued that if he were free under the MISSOURI COMPROMISE, he was a citizen of Missouri and could sue Sanford, a citizen of New York, in federal court. Sanford responded that Scott could never be considered a citizen "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."

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Wells rejected this argument, concluding that if Dred Scott were free, then he could sue in federal court as a citizen of Missouri. But Scott lost at trial and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1857, by a vote of 7–2, the Court held that the Missouri Compromise, under which Scott claimed to be free, was unconstitutional. In a bitterly proslavery opinion,

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney held that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery in the territories. This decision shocked and angered most northerners, who had long seen the Missouri Compromise as a central piece of legislation for organizing the settlement of the West and for accommodating differing sectional interests.

Ignoring the fact that free black men in most of the northern states, as well as in North Carolina, could vote at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, Taney declared that African Americans could never be citizens of the United States. He wrote that blacks "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the U.S. 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 [1787–88] 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."

Taney's opinion outraged most northerners. Abraham Lincoln attacked the decision in his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, and again during the presidential campaign of 1860. The Supreme Court decision forced Republicans to take a firm stand in favor of black citizen-ship and fundamental rights for blacks.

Although the Dred Scott decision denied civil rights to blacks, the Civil War era (1861–1865) federal government ignored it; during the conflict, Congress banned slavery in all the western territories, despite Taney's assertion that such an act was unconstitutional. In 1866, Congress sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the states, declaring that all persons born in the nation are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they live. The ratification 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.

DRED SCOTT CASE

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