Dred Scott v. Sandford

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held that the United States Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and therefore they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. The decision is widely considered the worst in the Supreme Court's history and is broadly denounced for its overt racism, judicial activism, and poor legal reasoning. It de jure nationalized slavery, and thus played a crucial role in the events that led to the American Civil War four years later. Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions." Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it the Court's "greatest self-inflicted wound".

The decision involved Dred Scott, an enslaved black man whose owners had taken him from Missouri, a slave-holding state, into Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal. When his owners later brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom and claimed that because he had been taken into "free" U.S. territory, he had automatically been freed and was legally no longer a slave. Scott sued first in Missouri state court, which ruled that he was still a slave under its law. He then sued in U.S. federal court, which ruled against him by deciding that it had to apply Missouri law to the case. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In March 1857, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision against Scott. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Court ruled that people of African descent "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 that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States"; more specifically, that African Americans were not entitled to "full liberty of speech... to hold public meetings... and to keep and carry arms" along with other constitutionally protected rights and privileges. Taney supported his ruling with an extended survey of American state and local laws from the time of the Constitution's drafting in 1787 that purported to show that a "perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery." Because the Court ruled that Scott was not an American citizen, he was also not a citizen of any state and, accordingly, could never establish the "diversity of citizenship" that Article III of the U.S. Constitution requires for a U.S. federal court to be able to exercise jurisdiction over a case. After ruling on those issues surrounding Scott, Taney struck down the Missouri Compromise because, by prohibiting slavery in U.S. territories north of the 36°30′ parallel, it interfered with slave owners' property rights under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Although Chief Justice Taney and several other justices hoped the decision would settle the slavery controversy, which was increasingly dividing the American public, the decision only exacerbated interstate tension. Taney's majority opinion suited the slaveholding states, but was intensely decried in all the other states. The decision inflamed the national debate over slavery and deepened the divide that led ultimately to the American Civil War. In 1865, after the Union's victory, the Court's ruling in Dred Scott was superseded by passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery, and by Congress with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 conferring full citizenship and equal rights flowing from it. After Southern lawyers and courts countermanded this federal law with state law, Congress and three-quarters of the states in 1868 constitutionalized the 1866 Act by enacting the Fourteenth Amendment, whose first section guaranteed citizenship for "[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof."

Historians agree that the Dred Scott decision was a major disaster for the United States and dramatically inflamed tensions leading to the Civil War. The ruling is widely considered to have had the intent of bringing finality to the territorial crisis resulting from the Louisiana Purchase by creating a constitutional right to own slaves anywhere in the country, while permanently disenfranchising all people of African descent, in an act generally believed to constitute blatant judicial activism. Often cited in proof of this is the court's decision to go out of its way to overturn the Missouri Compromise, which had already been replaced with the Kansas–Nebraska Act and thus was a legally moot issue, because the latter act was determined by the due process of popular sovereignty, and thus could not be overturned the same way as the Missouri Compromise. During the 1860 United States elections, Republicans rejected the ruling as being corrupted by partisanship and non-binding because the court had no jurisdiction. Their presidential nominee Abraham Lincoln stated he would not permit slavery anywhere in the country except where it already existed, which directly contradicted the court's ruling. His election is considered the final event that led the Southern states to secede from the Union, igniting the Civil War.

Background

Political setting

thumb|upright=1.75|The [[Missouri Compromise created the slave-holding state Missouri (Mo., yellow) but prohibited slavery in the rest of the former Louisiana Territory (here, marked Missouri Territory 1812, green) north of latitude 36°30' North. Modern state boundaries are also shown.]]

In the late 1810s, a major political dispute arose over the creation of new U.S. states from the vast territory the United States had acquired from France in 1803 via the Louisiana Purchase. The dispute centered on whether the new states would be "free" states in which slavery would be illegal, as in the Northern states, or whether they would be "slave" states in which slavery would be legal, as in the Southern states.

In 1820, the U.S. Congress passed legislation known as the "Missouri Compromise" that was intended to resolve the dispute. The Compromise first admitted Maine into the Union as a free state, then created Missouri out of a portion of the Louisiana Purchase territory and admitted it as a slave state; it also prohibited slavery in the area north of the parallel 36°30′ north, where most of the territory lay. The legal effects of a slaveowner taking his slaves from Missouri into the free territory north of latitude 36°30′ north, as well as the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise itself, eventually came to a head in the Dred Scott case.

Dred Scott and John Emerson

thumb|Dred Scott

Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia around 1799. Little is known of his early years. His owner, Peter Blow, moved to Alabama in 1818, taking his six slaves along to work a farm near Huntsville. In 1830, Blow gave up farming and settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he sold Scott to U.S. Army surgeon Dr. John Emerson. After purchasing Scott, Emerson took him to Fort Armstrong in Illinois. A free state, Illinois had been free as a territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and had prohibited slavery in its constitution in 1819 when it was admitted as a state.

In 1836, Emerson moved with Scott from Illinois to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory in what has become the state of Minnesota. Slavery in the Wisconsin Territory (some of which, including Fort Snelling, was part of the Louisiana Purchase) was prohibited by the U.S. Congress under the Missouri Compromise. During his stay at Fort Snelling, Scott married Harriet Robinson in a civil ceremony by Harriet's owner, Major Lawrence Taliaferro, a justice of the peace who was also an Indian agent. The ceremony would have been unnecessary had Dred Scott been a slave, as slave marriages had no recognition in the law.

Procedural history

Scott v. Emerson

First state circuit court trial

Having been unsuccessful in his attempt to purchase his freedom, Dred Scott, with the help of his legal advisers, sued Emerson for his freedom in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County on April 6, 1846. They received financial assistance from the family of Dred's previous owner, Peter Blow. Blow's daughter Charlotte was married to Joseph Charless, an officer at the Bank of Missouri. Charless signed legal documents as security for the Scotts and later secured the services of the bank's attorney, Samuel Mansfield Bay, for the trial. and Rachel v. Walker. In Winny v. Whitesides, the Missouri Supreme Court had ruled in 1824 that a person who had been held as a slave in Illinois, where slavery was illegal, and then brought to Missouri, was free by virtue of residence in a free state. Irene Emerson was represented by George W. Goode, a proslavery lawyer from Virginia. By the time the case went to trial, it had been reassigned from Judge John M. Krum, who was proslavery, to Judge Alexander Hamilton, who was known to be sympathetic to freedom suits.

The jury quickly returned a verdict in favor of Dred Scott, nominally making him a free man. and her departure had no impact on the case.</blockquote>Judge Scott did not deny the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise and acknowledged that its prohibition of slavery was "absolute", but only within the specified territory. Thus, a slave crossing the border could obtain his freedom, but only within the court of the free state. After the Missouri Supreme Court decision, Judge Hamilton turned down a request by Emerson's lawyers to release the rent payments from escrow and to deliver the slaves into their owner's custody.

At trial in 1854, Judge Robert William Wells directed the jury to rely on Missouri law on the question of Scott's freedom. Since the Missouri Supreme Court had held that Scott remained a slave, the jury found in favor of Sanford. Scott then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the clerk misspelled the defendant's name, and the case was recorded as Dred Scott v. Sandford, with an ever-erroneous title. Scott was represented before the Supreme Court by Montgomery Blair and George Ticknor Curtis, whose brother Benjamin was a Supreme Court Justice. Sanford was represented by Reverdy Johnson and Henry S. Geyer. Buchanan hoped that the decision would quell unrest in the country over the slavery issue by issuing a ruling to take it out of political debate. He later successfully pressured Associate Justice Robert Cooper Grier, a Northerner, to join the Southern majority in Dred Scott to prevent the appearance that the decision was made along sectional lines. According to historian Paul Finkelman:<blockquote> Buchanan already knew what the Court was going to decide. In a major breach of Court etiquette, Justice Grier, who, like Buchanan, was from Pennsylvania, had kept the President-elect fully informed about the progress of the case and the internal debates within the Court. When Buchanan urged the nation to support the decision, he already knew what Taney would say. Republican suspicions of impropriety turned out to be fully justified.</blockquote>

Biographer Jean H. Baker argues that Buchanan's use of political pressure on a member of a sitting court was regarded then, as now, to be highly improper. Republicans fueled speculation as to Buchanan's influence by publicizing that Taney had secretly informed Buchanan of the decision. Buchanan declared in his inaugural address that the slavery question would "be speedily and finally settled" by the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court decision

On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott in a 7–2 decision that fills more than 200 pages in the United States Reports. It was one of the longest set of opinions in Supreme Court history up to that point. The decision contains opinions from all nine justices, but the "majority opinion" has always been the focus of the controversy.

Opinion of the Court

thumb|right|upright=.95|Chief Justice [[Roger B. Taney|Roger Taney, the author of the majority opinion in the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision]]

Seven justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney began the Court's opinion with what he saw as the core issue in the case: whether Black people could possess federal citizenship under the U.S. Constitution.

In answer, the Court ruled they could not. It held that black people could not be U.S. citizens, and therefore a lawsuit to which they were a party could never qualify for the "diversity of citizenship" that Article III of the Constitution requires for a federal court to have jurisdiction over a case that does not involve a question of federal law.

The primary rationale for the Court's ruling was Taney's assertion that black African slaves and their descendants were never intended to be part of the American social and political community:

The Court extensively reviewed laws from the original American states that involved the status of black Americans at the time of the Constitution's drafting in 1787. It concluded that these laws showed that a "perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery". The Court therefore ruled that black people were not American citizens and could not sue as citizens in federal courts. This meant that U.S. states lacked the power to alter the legal status of black people by granting them state citizenship:

This holding normally would have ended the decision, since it disposed of Dred Scott's case by effectively declaring that Scott had no standing to bring suit, but Taney did not confine his ruling to the matter immediately before the Court. He went on to assess the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise itself, writing that the Compromise's legal provisions intended to free slaves who were living north of the 36°N 30' latitude line in the western territories. In the Court's judgment, this constituted the government depriving owners of slave property without due process of law, which is forbidden under the Fifth Amendment. Taney also reasoned that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights implicitly precluded any possibility of constitutional rights for black African slaves and their descendants. Thus, Taney concluded:

Taney held that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, marking the first time since the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme Court had struck down a federal law, although the Missouri Compromise had already been effectively overridden by the Kansas–Nebraska Act. Taney based this argument on a narrow interpretation of the Property Clause of Article 4, Section 3 of the Constitution: "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States..." He ruled that the Property Clause "applied only to the property which the States held in common at that time and has no reference whatever to any territory or other property which the new sovereignty might afterwards itself acquire." Because the Louisiana Territory was not part of the United States at the time of the Constitution's ratification, Congress did not have the authority to ban slavery in the territory. Thus, the Missouri Compromise exceeded the scope of Congress powers and was unconstitutional, and hence Dred Scott was still a slave regardless of his residence in the purportedly free Northwest Territory, and he was still a slave under Missouri law, which had proper authority over the matter. For all these reasons, the Court concluded that Scott could not bring suit in U.S. federal court.

Concurrences

Justices Wayne, Catron, Daniel, Nelson, Grier, and Campbell all wrote separate concurrences, with Grier joining Nelson's concurrence.

Dissents

Two justices, Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean, dissented from the Court's decision and wrote dissenting opinions. Curtis' 67-page dissent argued that the Court's conclusion that black people could not be U.S. citizens was legally and historically baseless. He pointed out that when the Constitution was adopted in 1789, black men could vote in 5 of the 13 states. Under the law, that made them citizens both of their individual states and of the United States. Curtis cited many historical state laws and court decisions in support of his position. His dissent was "extremely persuasive", and it prompted Taney to delay issuing the decision for several weeks while he added 18 pages of rebuttal to the majority opinion.

McLean's dissent deemed the argument that black people could not be citizens "more a matter of taste than of law". He attacked much of the Court's decision as non-binding obiter dicta, arguing that once the court determined that it did not have jurisdiction to hear Scott's case, it should have simply dismissed the action without passing judgment on the merits of Scott's lawsuit.

Curtis and McLean both attacked the Court's overturning of the Missouri Compromise. They noted that it was not necessary to decide the question, and that none of the authors of the Constitution had ever raised constitutional objections to the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, or the subsequent acts that barred slavery north of 36°30' N, or the prohibition on importing slaves from overseas passed in 1808. Curtis said slavery was not listed in the constitution as a "natural right", but rather was a creation of public law. Article IV, section 3 of the Constitution states, "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State." No exception was made for slavery, which thus fell under the regulatory power of Congress.

Reactions

The Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott was greeted with widespread fury outside the slave-holding states. American political historian Robert G. McCloskey described the reaction:

Many Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, who was rapidly becoming the leading Republican in Illinois and was elected President three years later, regarded the decision as part of a plot to expand and eventually impose the legalization of slavery throughout all of the states. Some southern extremists wanted all states to recognize slavery as a constitutional right. Lincoln rejected the court's majority opinion that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution," pointing out that the constitution did not ever refer to slaves as property, and in fact explicitly called them "persons".

Southern Democrats considered Republicans to be lawless rebels who were provoking disunion by their refusal to accept the Supreme Court's decision as the law of the land. Many northern opponents of slavery offered a legal argument for refusing to acknowledge the Dred Scott decision on the Missouri Compromise. They argued, following Justice Curtis' dissenting opinion, that the Court's determination that the federal courts had no jurisdiction to hear the case rendered the remainder of the decision a non-binding obiter dictum—an advisement rather than an authoritative interpretation of the law. Stephen Douglas attacked that position in the Lincoln–Douglas debates:

In a speech at Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln responded that the Republican Party was not seeking to defy the Supreme Court, but he hoped they could convince it to reverse its ruling:

Democrats had previously refused to accept the court's interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as permanently binding. During the Andrew Jackson administration, Taney, then Attorney General, had written:

Frederick Douglass, a prominent black abolitionist who considered the decision to be unconstitutional and Taney's reasoning contrary to the Founding Fathers' vision, predicted that the decision would bring the conflict over slavery to a head:

According to Jefferson Davis, then U.S. Senator from Mississippi and later President of the Confederacy, the case merely "presented the question whether Cuffee [a derogatory term for a black person] should be kept in his normal condition or not... [and] whether the Congress of the United States could decide what might or might not be property in a Territory–the case being that of an officer of the army sent into a Territory to perform his public duty, having taken with him his negro slave".

Impact on the litigants

Irene Emerson moved to Massachusetts in 1850 and married Calvin C. Chaffee, a doctor and abolitionist who was elected to Congress on the Know Nothing and Republican tickets. Following the Supreme Court ruling, pro-slavery newspapers attacked Chaffee as a hypocrite. Chaffee protested that Dred Scott belonged to his brother-in-law and that he had nothing to do with Scott's enslavement.

Taylor Blow filed the manumission papers with Judge Hamilton on May 26, 1857. The emancipation of Dred Scott and his family was national news and was celebrated in northern cities. Scott worked as a porter in a hotel in St. Louis, where he was a minor celebrity. His wife took in laundry. Dred Scott died of tuberculosis on November 7, 1858. Harriet died on June 17, 1876.

Political

Southerners, who had grown uncomfortable with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, argued that they had a constitutional right to bring slaves into the territories, regardless of any decision by a territorial legislature on the subject. The Dred Scott decision seemed to endorse that view.

Although Taney believed that the decision represented a compromise that would be a final settlement of the slavery question by transforming a contested political issue into a matter of settled law, the decision produced the opposite result. It strengthened Northern opposition to slavery, divided the Democratic Party on sectional lines, encouraged secessionist elements among Southern supporters of slavery to make bolder demands, and strengthened the Republican Party.

In 1860, the Republican Party explicitly rejected the Dred Scott decision in their official platform, stating, "the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition, and with legislative and judicial precedent; is revolutionary in its tendency, and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country."

The Territorial Slavery Act of 1862 repudiated Dred Scott. In adopting the act, Congress essentially took the view that the Dred Scott ruling was restricted solely to Dred Scott and his family.

Later references

In 1859, when defending two black men, John Anthony Copeland and Shields Green, from the charge of treason following their participation in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, their attorney George Sennott cited the Dred Scott decision in arguing successfully that since they were not citizens according to that Supreme Court ruling, they could not commit treason. Nevertheless, they were found guilty and executed on other charges.

In 1896, in the Jim Crow era, Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenting vote in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which declared racial segregation constitutional and created the concept of "separate but equal". In his dissent, Harlan wrote that the majority's opinion would "prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case".

Charles Evans Hughes, writing in 1927 on the Supreme Court's history, described Dred Scott as a "self-inflicted wound" from which the court would not recover for many years.

In 1952, as a law clerk to Justice Robert H. Jackson, future Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote in a memo on Brown v. Board of Education: "Scott v. Sandford was the result of Taney's effort to protect slaveholders from legislative interference."

Dissenting from Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), insofar as it upheld the right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade (1973), Justice Antonin Scalia compared the rationale behind Planned Parenthood v. Casey to Dred Scott:

Dred Scott ... rested upon the concept of "substantive due process" that the Court praises and employs today. Indeed, Dred Scott was "very possibly the first application of substantive due process in the Supreme Court, the original precedent for ... Roe v. Wade".

</blockquote> Justice Clarence Thomas similarly compared Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Chief Justice John Roberts compared Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) to Dred Scott as another example of trying to settle a contentious issue through a ruling that went beyond the scope of the Constitution.

Historian Sean Wilentz called Trump v. United States, the 2024 Supreme Court decision that conferred immunity from criminal prosecution on a president's official acts, "The 'Dred Scott' of Our Time." Other writers made the same comparison.

Legacy

thumb|right|Dred and Harriet Scott Statue in St. Louis

1977: The Scotts' great-grandson John A. Madison Jr., an attorney, gave the invocation at the ceremony at the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, a National Historic Landmark, for the dedication of a National Historic Marker commemorating the Scotts' case tried there.
2000: Harriet and Dred Scott's petition papers in their freedom suit were displayed at the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, following the discovery of more than 300 freedom suits in the archives of the U.S. circuit court.
2006: An historic plaque was erected at the Old Courthouse to honor the active roles of both Dred and Harriet Scott in their freedom suit and the case's significance in U.S. history.
2012: A monument depicting Dred and Harriet Scott was erected at the Old Courthouse's east entrance facing the St. Louis Gateway Arch.
2024: During the 2024 presidential campaign, the National Federation of Republican Assemblies cited Dred Scott v. Sandford to claim that Vice President Kamala Harris is not a natural born U.S citizen and therefore is ineligible to run for president.

Notes

References

Citations

Works cited

External links

Primary documents and bibliography about the Dred Scott case, from the Library of Congress
"Dred Scott decision", Encyclopædia Britannica 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 17 December 2006. www.yowebsite.com
Gregory J. Wallance, "Dred Scott Decision: The Lawsuit That Started The Civil War", History.net, originally in Civil War Times Magazine, March/April 2006
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, National Park Service
Infography about the Dred Scott Case
The Dred Scott Case Collection, Washington University in St. Louis
Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
Dred Scott case articles from William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator
"Supreme Court Landmark Case Dred Scott v. Sandford" from C-SPAN's Landmark Cases: Historic Supreme Court Decisions
Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott Versus John F.A. Sandford. December Term, 1856 via Google Books