Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): The Supreme Court and Slavery

Dred Scott v. Sandford was a ruling of the United States Supreme Court, delivered on 6 March 1857, that denied freedom to an enslaved man named Dred Scott. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that Black Americans could never be citizens and that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the western territories. Meant to settle the slavery question, the decision instead enraged the North and pushed the country closer to civil war.

Dred Scott’s long road to court

Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia around 1799 and was taken to St. Louis, Missouri, by the Blow family. In the early 1830s he was sold to Dr. John Emerson, a US Army surgeon. Emerson took Scott to Fort Armstrong in Illinois, a free state, and then to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory (in present-day Minnesota), where slavery was banned under the Missouri Compromise. Scott lived on free soil for several years.

At Fort Snelling, Scott married Harriet Robinson, another enslaved person, in a civil ceremony performed by a local official. They later had two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie. After Emerson died in 1843, the family passed into the control of his widow, Irene Emerson, back in St. Louis.

On 6 April 1846 Dred and Harriet Scott filed separate freedom suits in the St. Louis Circuit Court, which sat in the building now known as the Old Courthouse. Missouri courts had long held that an enslaved person taken to live on free soil became free, a principle sometimes summarised as “once free, always free”. The Scotts lost their first trial in 1847 on a technicality, but a jury granted them freedom at a retrial in January 1850.

From Missouri to the Supreme Court

In 1852 the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the verdict. Reflecting the hardening sectional mood, it abandoned decades of precedent and ruled that Missouri need not honour the anti-slavery laws of other states.

Scott’s lawyers then turned to the federal courts. Irene Emerson’s brother, John F. A. Sanford of New York, was by then managing the family’s affairs, so Scott sued him in federal court on the grounds that the two were citizens of different states. A clerk misspelled Sanford’s name, giving the case its official title. The federal circuit court ruled against Scott in 1854, and the case went to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in February 1856 and again in December 1856.

The ruling

The Court announced its decision on 6 March 1857, two days after the inauguration of President James Buchanan, who had privately encouraged a broad ruling. The vote was 7 to 2 against Scott, and each of the nine justices wrote an opinion. Taney’s majority opinion made two sweeping claims.

First, he held that people of African descent, whether enslaved or free, were not and could not be citizens of the United States, so Scott had no right to sue in federal court. Taney argued that at the founding Black people had been regarded as an inferior class, and wrote that they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”. These words, describing what Taney claimed was the founders’ view, were widely quoted as if they expressed the Court’s own principle, and they caused enormous outrage.

Second, Taney ruled that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Enslaved people were property, he argued, and the Fifth Amendment forbade depriving citizens of property without due process of law. The Missouri Compromise line, already repealed in 1854, was therefore declared unconstitutional. It was only the second time the Court had struck down a major federal law, after Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

Justices John McLean and Benjamin R. Curtis dissented. Curtis showed that free Black men had voted in at least five states when the Constitution was ratified, so they had been part of “the people”. He resigned from the Court later in 1857, partly because of bitter disputes over the case.

Key people

• Dred Scott (c. 1799-1858): Enslaved man who spent eleven years seeking freedom through the courts.
• Harriet Robinson Scott (c. 1815-1876): His wife, who filed her own freedom suit alongside his.
• Roger B. Taney: Chief Justice from Maryland, author of the majority opinion.
• Benjamin R. Curtis: Justice from Massachusetts whose detailed dissent became a rallying text for opponents.
• John F. A. Sanford: New York businessman and defendant in the federal case.

Reaction and consequences

Southern leaders hailed the decision as vindication. In the North, it was seen as proof of a “Slave Power” conspiracy, since it implied that no territory could exclude slavery and raised fears that free states might one day be forced to accept it. Northern state legislatures passed resolutions condemning the ruling, and the Republican Party, whose central aim of keeping slavery out of the territories had just been declared unconstitutional, grew stronger rather than weaker.

The decision also trapped Stephen A. Douglas. In the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln pressed him on how popular sovereignty could survive if Congress could not ban slavery. Douglas replied that settlers could still keep slavery out by refusing to pass laws protecting it. This “Freeport Doctrine” kept him his Illinois Senate seat but alienated Southern Democrats, helping to split the party in 1860. Coming soon after the violence of Bleeding Kansas, the ruling deepened distrust between the sections.

For the Scott family, the outcome was personal. Shortly after the decision, ownership passed to Taylor Blow, a son of Dred Scott’s original owners, who freed the family on 26 May 1857. Dred Scott worked as a porter in a St. Louis hotel and died of tuberculosis on 17 September 1858.

Legacy

The Dred Scott decision is widely regarded by legal scholars and historians as the worst ruling in the Supreme Court’s history. Its denial of Black citizenship was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, whose first sentence guarantees citizenship to all persons born or naturalised in the United States. Slavery itself was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, after the war that the Emancipation Proclamation had already turned into a struggle against slavery.

The case is also remembered for what it reveals about the Scotts themselves. Freedom suits were common in St. Louis courts, and hundreds of enslaved people used them in the decades before the Civil War. Harriet Scott’s own suit, filed alongside her husband’s, was legally as strong as his, and some historians think she may have been a driving force behind the family’s decision to go to court.

The Old Courthouse in St. Louis is now part of Gateway Arch National Park, and a statue of Dred and Harriet Scott was dedicated outside it in 2012.

Timeline

• c. 1799: Dred Scott is born into slavery in Virginia.
• 1846, 6 April: Dred and Harriet Scott file freedom suits in St. Louis.
• 1850, January: A St. Louis jury declares the Scotts free.
• 1852: The Missouri Supreme Court reverses the verdict.
• 1854, May: A federal circuit court rules against Scott.
• 1857, 6 March: The Supreme Court rules 7-2 against Scott.
• 1857, 26 May: Taylor Blow frees the Scott family.
• 1858, 17 September: Dred Scott dies in St. Louis.
• 1868, 9 July: The Fourteenth Amendment is ratified, overturning the citizenship ruling.

Why it matters

The Dred Scott decision showed that the courts could not settle a moral and political conflict as deep as slavery. By declaring that Black Americans had no claim to citizenship and that slavery could not be barred from the West, it destroyed the remaining middle ground and helped bring about the election of Lincoln and the war that followed.