Dred Scott v. Sandford

In 1846 Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in St. Louis. From 1833 to 1843 Scott had lived with his enslaver, an army surgeon, in the free state of Illinois and in federal territory where the Missouri Compromise forbade slavery, including Fort Snelling, and courts had previously ruled that long residence on free soil made enslaved people free. What looked like a routine suit became an eleven-year legal struggle. Scott lost in the Missouri courts, filed a new suit in federal court, and appealed to the Supreme Court as slavery became the most explosive issue in American politics.

• Could a Black man descended from enslaved people be a citizen with the right to sue in federal court?
• Did residence in a free territory make Scott free?
• Did Congress have power to prohibit slavery in the territories, as the Missouri Compromise had done?

By a 7–2 vote, the Court ruled against Scott. Chief Justice Taney held that a Black person whose ancestors had been brought to the country and sold as slaves — whether enslaved or free — could not be an American citizen and therefore could not sue in federal court. He went further: the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, because Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories.

Taney reasoned that people of African descent whose ancestors had been brought to the country as slaves were not part of the political community that created the Constitution, and so could not be citizens. He held that enslaved people were property protected by the Fifth Amendment, so a federal law depriving a slaveholder of that property by banning slavery in a territory was unconstitutional. In dissent, Justice Benjamin Curtis criticized Taney for deciding the merits after concluding the Court lacked jurisdiction and cast doubt on Taney’s claim that the founders categorically opposed antislavery laws; Justice John McLean also dissented.

The decision delighted Southern slaveholders and outraged Northerners. By declaring that Congress could not stop slavery’s spread into the territories, it struck at the heart of the new Republican Party’s program. Rather than settling the slavery question, the ruling moved the nation closer to civil war.

The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments overturned the decision, abolishing slavery and declaring all persons born in the United States citizens. Many legal scholars consider Dred Scott the worst decision ever rendered by the Supreme Court, and it is often cited as a warning against judges attempting to resolve deep political conflicts by judicial decree.