In Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that no person of African descent could be a citizen of the United States and that Congress had no constitutional power to ban slavery in federal territories. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote the majority opinion. It is widely regarded as the worst decision the Court has ever issued, and it was ultimately undone only by the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Who Dred Scott Was and Why He Sued
Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia and was later purchased by Dr. John Emerson, an Army surgeon. Emerson’s postings took Scott out of Missouri and into places where slavery was illegal. In 1834, Scott was brought to Rock Island, Illinois, a free state. Around 1836, he was taken to Fort Snelling in the Upper Louisiana Territory, north of the 36°30′ line where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery. He lived at Fort Snelling until roughly 1838 and married Harriet Robinson there.2National Park Service. The Dred Scott Case
After Emerson eventually returned the Scotts to Missouri and died in 1843, his widow Irene inherited the family. On April 6, 1846, Dred and Harriet each filed freedom petitions in the St. Louis Circuit Court.3Missouri Secretary of State. Missouri Digital Heritage – Dred Scott Case, 1846-1857 Their theory tracked long-standing Missouri precedent: prolonged residence on free soil should have made them free. Scott won at trial. The Missouri Supreme Court reversed, breaking with its own earlier decisions, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court on diversity jurisdiction after ownership passed to John Sanford of New York (misspelled “Sandford” in the official reports).
The Two Questions Before the Court
Two constitutional questions dominated the case. First, could a person of African descent qualify as a citizen under Article III and therefore sue in federal court? Federal diversity jurisdiction requires that both parties be citizens of their respective states.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 Sanford argued that Scott could not be a citizen because he was “a negro of African descent” whose ancestors had been sold as slaves.5Legal Information Institute. Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error, v. John F. A. Sandford
Second, did Congress have the constitutional power to prohibit slavery in federal territories? If the Missouri Compromise was valid, Scott’s years at Fort Snelling were spent on free soil. If it was unconstitutional, the legal ground under his freedom claim, and under decades of congressional practice, gave way.
The Court’s Ruling on Citizenship
Taney’s majority opinion answered the citizenship question with a flat denial. People of African descent, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States and could never become citizens. Because Scott was not a citizen, the federal courts had no jurisdiction to hear his case at all.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Taney claimed to be reading the original intent of the framers. He wrote that at the founding, people of African descent were regarded as so far inferior that they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” That line became the most infamous sentence in Supreme Court history. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution, Taney asserted, had ever extended its protections to them.
Having found no jurisdiction, the Court could have stopped. Taney did not. He pushed on to the second question, and it was that decision to keep going that turned a jurisdictional dismissal into a national rupture.
The Court’s Ruling on the Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 permitted slavery south of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Purchase territory and banned it north of that line.6National Archives. Missouri Compromise (1820) For nearly four decades it had been the primary congressional mechanism for managing slavery’s expansion. Taney’s opinion declared it unconstitutional. This was only the second time in American history that the Supreme Court had struck down a federal statute. The first was Marbury v. Madison in 1803.7National Archives. Marbury v. Madison (1803)
The reasoning ran through the Fifth Amendment. That amendment bars the federal government from depriving any person of property without due process of law. The Court treated enslaved people as property protected by that clause. A federal law that freed an enslaved person on entry into a northern territory, Taney reasoned, amounted to seizing a slaveholder’s property without any legal proceeding. Congress therefore had no power to ban slavery in a territory at all.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The practical effect was enormous. If Congress could not restrict slavery anywhere in the territories, the whole strategy of containing slavery through legislative compromise collapsed. Every federal territory was now open to slaveholders as a matter of constitutional right.
The Dissents
Justices Benjamin Curtis and John McLean dissented, and their opinions became rallying texts for the antislavery movement.
Curtis attacked the citizenship holding directly. He documented that free Black men had been citizens in several states at the time of the Constitution’s ratification and had voted in some of those states. If they were state citizens at the founding, he argued, they were necessarily citizens of the United States with the right to sue in federal court. He also defended Congress’s authority over the territories, pointing to decades of legislative practice and the Constitution’s Territory Clause. Curtis resigned from the Court shortly after the decision.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393
McLean rejected the majority’s treatment of enslaved people as ordinary property. A slaveholder who voluntarily brought an enslaved person into free territory, he wrote, accepted the legal consequences of that jurisdiction’s laws. He cited decades of state court decisions, including Missouri’s own earlier rulings, holding that residence on free soil worked an emancipation the slaveholder could not later undo by returning to a slave state.
What Happened to Dred Scott After the Ruling
The dismissal for lack of jurisdiction left the lower ruling in place, and Scott remained legally enslaved. Ownership of the Scott family then passed to Taylor Blow, whose family had originally owned Scott and had helped finance his lawsuit. On May 26, 1857, barely two months after the decision, Blow formally freed Dred and Harriet Scott.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) Scott worked as a hotel porter in St. Louis and died on September 17, 1858, after less than sixteen months of freedom. Harriet survived him by many years.
How the Decision Pushed the Country Toward War
Rather than settling the slavery question, the ruling radicalized Northern moderates who had been willing to tolerate slavery where it existed but not its expansion. It became a central issue in the 1858 Illinois Senate debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Lincoln argued that the decision, taken together with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was part of a program to make slavery legal everywhere in the country.
At the Freeport debate, Lincoln pressed Douglas to explain how popular sovereignty could survive a Supreme Court ruling that said no legislature could ban slavery. Douglas answered that settlers could effectively exclude slavery by refusing to pass local laws protecting slaveholders’ property. That answer, known as the Freeport Doctrine, alienated Southern Democrats, who demanded affirmative federal protection for slavery in every territory. By 1860 the Democratic Party had split, running separate Northern and Southern candidates. Lincoln won on a platform of halting slavery’s expansion. Southern states began seceding before he took office, and civil war followed within months.
How the Reconstruction Amendments Overturned It
Three constitutional amendments ratified after the war repudiated every major holding in Dred Scott.
The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States. That destroyed the legal framework that had treated human beings as property protected by the Fifth Amendment.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, targeted Taney’s citizenship holding with unmistakable precision. 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.”8Constitution Annotated, Congress.gov. Fourteenth Amendment It also barred states from denying any person due process or equal protection of the laws. That citizenship clause remains the basis for birthright citizenship today.
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited denial of voting rights based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Together, the three amendments did more than reverse a single ruling. They rewrote the relationship between the federal government and individual rights, and they closed the constitutional door that Taney had tried to hold open.