The most quoted line from the Dred Scott decision comes from Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s 1857 majority opinion, which declared that Black people in America “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The sentence sits inside a longer passage denying that people of African descent were ever meant to be citizens under the Constitution, and the 7–2 ruling it anchored was later overturned by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The Full “No Rights” Passage
Taney’s infamous sentence is almost always shortened. The complete passage reads:
“They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”2Library of Congress. The Dred Scott Decision: Opinion of Chief Justice Taney
Taney framed these views as a description of what earlier generations had believed, not as a statement of his own personal conviction. The framing changes little in practice. He introduced the passage precisely to support the Court’s holding that Black people could not be citizens, so whether he was reporting past attitudes or endorsing them, the legal effect was the same: total exclusion from the constitutional community.
What Taney Said About Citizenship
The “no rights” sentence belongs to a broader passage on who counted as a citizen of the United States. Taney wrote:
“We think they are not, and that they 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. On the contrary, they were at that time 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 the Government might choose to grant them.”3Library of Congress. The Case of Dred Scott in the United States Supreme Court
Two features of this passage matter. Taney applied the rule to all people of African descent, using the phrase “whether emancipated or not,” so free Black Americans fell outside citizenship along with enslaved ones. And he described any rights they did hold as favors the government “might choose to grant them,” not as protections they could claim.
The legal work this passage did was jurisdictional. Scott had sued in federal court under diversity jurisdiction, which requires the parties to be citizens of different states. Taney’s holding that no person of African descent qualified as a citizen meant Scott had no standing to bring the lawsuit at all.4Oyez. Dred Scott v. Sandford Taney conceded a state could grant a person rights within its own borders and even call that person a citizen locally, but state citizenship, in his reading, did not make anyone “a citizen of the United States” able to sue in federal court or invoke constitutional protections.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Taney on “All Men Are Created Equal”
The opinion also addressed the Declaration of Independence, which abolitionists had long cited as evidence that the founding generation believed in universal human equality. Taney acknowledged that the words, taken at face value, “would seem to embrace the whole human family.” He then argued they could not have been meant that way, because including Black people would have made the founders’ own conduct as slaveholders “utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted” and would have earned them “universal rebuke and reprobation.”5Justia. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856)
The reasoning turns on itself. Taney used the founders’ ownership of enslaved people as proof that the Declaration’s universal language could not have carried a universal meaning. The interpretive move let the Court read the Declaration as a document about white Americans while leaving the founders’ reputations intact.
The Case That Produced the Quote
Dred Scott was an enslaved man who had lived for roughly a decade in Illinois, a free state, and in the Wisconsin Territory, where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery.4Oyez. Dred Scott v. Sandford After returning to Missouri, he sued for his freedom on the ground that years of residence on free soil had made him a free man. The named defendant was John Sanford, brother-in-law of Scott’s deceased former owner Dr. John Emerson; a clerk misspelled the name as “Sandford” in the court records and the mistake was never corrected.
The narrow question was whether time in a free jurisdiction had changed Scott’s legal status. Taney used the case to answer much larger ones, and the citizenship passage quoted above is where he did so. The decision reached well beyond anything needed to resolve Scott’s individual claim.
How the Quote Was Overturned
The Dred Scott ruling was not reversed by a later court. It was reversed by amending the Constitution.
The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the United States, removing the foundation for treating enslaved people as constitutionally protected property.6Library of Congress. U.S. Constitution – Thirteenth Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, targeted the citizenship holding directly. Its opening sentence reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”7Library of Congress. Fourteenth Amendment The language was written to bury Taney’s rule. It made birthright citizenship a constitutional guarantee, extended due process and equal protection to every person in U.S. jurisdiction, and collapsed the split Taney had drawn between state and federal citizenship.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The quote remains what it was in 1857, but the law it announced no longer exists. Read today, the passage is a record of what the Supreme Court once held and what the country changed its Constitution to reject.