Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)

By: Paul Finkelman

Source:

 The Oxford Companion to American Law

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)

In 1850 a Missouri trial court declared Dred Scott to be free because his late owner, Dr. Emerson, had taken him to the free state of Illinois and later to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory (present-day Minnesota), where Congress had prohibited slavery under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. This decision was consistent with a long line of Missouri cases dating from 1824 that held that residence in a free jurisdiction led to the emancipation of a slave.

The Missouri Supreme Court reversed this result in Scott v. Emerson (1852), rejecting its precedents because of the “dark and fell spirit” of abolitionism, which the court claimed had taken over the North. In 1854 Scott began a new suit in federal court against his new owner, John F. A. Sanford (his name is misspelled as Sandford in the official report of the case). Scott sued on the basis of diversity of citizenship, claiming he was a “citizen of Missouri” and noting Sanford was a “citizen of New York.” Sanford denied Scott’s right to sue him, arguing that because “Dred Scott, is not a citizen of the State of Missouri, as alleged in his declaration, 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.”

United States District Judge Robert W. Wells rejected Sanford’s theory, concluding that if Dred Scott was free, then he could sue in federal court as a citizen of Missouri. However, after hearing all the evidence, Wells charged the jury to uphold Scott’s slave status, based on the earlier Missouri decision that Scott was still a slave.

Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he lost in a 7-2 decision. In his “Opinion of the Court,”Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that the Missouri Compromise, under which Scott claimed to be free, unconstitutionally deprived southerners of their property in slaves without due process of law or just compensation, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. This decision shocked 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.

Taney also denied that blacks could ever be citizens of the United States, rhetorically declaring:

"The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution."

Ignoring the right of free black men (in most of the northern states, as well as North Carolina) to vote at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, Taney declared that African-Americans

"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 the instrument provides and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [1787–1788] 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 many northerners, especially members of the new Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln attacked the decision throughout his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 and again during the presidential campaign of 1860. The decision led many Republicans to support black citizenship and fundamental rights for blacks, and others to argue for black equality and suffrage.

The Lincoln Administration and the Civil War Congress ignored the decision, banning slavery in all the western territories, despite Taney’s assertation that such an act was unconstitutional. In 1866 Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared that all persons born in the nation were citizens of the United States and of the state in which they lived. 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 under the Constitution of 1787.See also Fourteenth Amendment; Race and Ethnicity; Slavery, Law of

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