Dred Scott v. Sandford
Dred Scott v. Sandford,[a] 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the U.S. 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.[2][3] The decision is widely considered the worst in the Supreme Court's history, being widely denounced for its overt racism, judicial activism, poor legal reasoning, and crucial role in the start of the American Civil War four years later.[4][5][6] Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions". A future chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, called it the Court's "greatest self-inflicted wound".[7]
Dred Scott v. Sandford
The decision involved the case of 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 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.[8] 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.[2] After ruling on those issues surrounding Scott, Taney struck down the Missouri Compromise as a limitation on slave owners' property rights that exceeded the U.S. Congress's constitutional powers.
Although 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.[9] Taney's majority opinion suited the slaveholding states, but was intensely decried in all the other states.[3] 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 the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, and 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 Court decision was a major disaster for the nation as it dramatically inflamed tensions leading to the Civil War.[10][11][12] The ruling is widely considered a blatant act of judicial activism[13] with 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.[14] The court's decision to overturn the Missouri Compromise, which had already been replaced with the Kansas–Nebraska Act and thus was a legally moot issue, is cited as proof of this 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.[15] During the United States election of 1860, 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 American Civil War.[16]
Impact on the litigants[edit]
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.[34] Nevertheless, as a means of freeing Scott, the Chaffees executed a deed transferring the Scott family to Henry Taylor Blow, the son of Scott's former owner, who could appear in person before the Missouri court.[34] Taylor Blow had also previously contributed to Scott's legal fees during the case.[53]
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.[20]
