The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, handed down 7–2 on March 6, 1857, held that no person of African descent could be a citizen of the United States and that Congress had no constitutional power to prohibit slavery in federal territories. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion invalidated the Missouri Compromise of 1820, denied Scott’s freedom, and treated enslaved people as property protected by the Fifth Amendment. It is widely regarded as the worst ruling the Supreme Court has ever issued. It stood as law until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865 and the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship in 1868.
What the Court Decided
The ruling did three things, each more consequential than the last.
First, on citizenship. Taney treated Scott’s standing to sue in federal court as a threshold question. Federal diversity jurisdiction requires that the parties be citizens of different states.1Congress.gov. ArtIII.S2.C1.16.1 Overview of Diversity Jurisdiction Taney answered that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a citizen of the United States within the meaning of the Constitution. He argued from colonial-era laws and the language of the Declaration of Independence that Black people “were not regarded in any of the States as members of the community which constituted the State” at the time the Constitution was adopted. A state might extend rights to anyone within its borders, he wrote, but that could not confer national citizenship or the right to sue in federal court. Shifting public opinion about race, he added, “cannot change its construction and meaning.”2National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The reach of this was national. Free Black men and women who voted, held property, and paid taxes in northern states were declared to have no recognized legal identity at the federal level.
Second, on the territories. Having found no jurisdiction, the Court could have stopped. It didn’t. Taney pressed on to the merits and struck down the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had barred slavery in Louisiana Purchase land north of the 36°30′ parallel. He read the Territory Clause in Article IV, Section 3 narrowly, arguing it applied only to lands the federal government held at ratification in 1787, not to territory acquired later.3Congress.gov. Constitution Annotated Article IV Section 3 In newly acquired territories the federal government was merely a trustee for the citizens of all the states and could not restrict what property those citizens brought with them.2National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) This was only the second time in American history that the Court had struck down an act of Congress, after Marbury v. Madison in 1803.
Third, on property and due process. Taney anchored the territorial holding in the Fifth Amendment, which forbids the federal government from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”4Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Fifth Amendment The Court classified enslaved people as property covered by that clause. A federal law that freed a person the moment they crossed a geographic line, Taney reasoned, seized property without any legal proceeding. He pointed to the Fugitive Slave Clause and the three-fifths provision as evidence that the Constitution’s only references to people of African descent “treat them as persons whom it was morally lawful to deal in as articles of property and to hold as slaves.”2National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) The federal government therefore had an affirmative duty to protect slaveholders’ property in every territory.
Scott himself was being classified as property under a clause that opens with the words “No person shall.” The dissenters noticed. The majority did not address it.
How the Case Reached the Supreme Court
Dred Scott and his wife Harriet filed separate freedom petitions in the St. Louis Circuit Court on April 6, 1846. Their owner, Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon, had taken them to the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory before returning them to Missouri. A Missouri statute allowed anyone held in wrongful enslavement to sue for freedom, and under the state’s long-standing “once free, always free” rule, an enslaved person taken to a free jurisdiction was considered permanently freed.5Missouri Digital Heritage. Missouri’s Dred Scott Case
A St. Louis jury ruled in Scott’s favor in 1850. The Missouri Supreme Court reversed in March 1852, declaring the state no longer obligated to recognize the antislavery laws of other jurisdictions.5Missouri Digital Heritage. Missouri’s Dred Scott Case Scott’s lawyers then moved into federal court. Irene Emerson had remarried by that point, and her brother John F.A. Sanford was managing the case; because Scott and Sanford lived in different states, diversity jurisdiction was available. A Supreme Court clerk misspelled Sanford’s name as “Sandford,” and that error stuck.2National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The Dissents
Justices Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean each wrote dissents that legal historians generally regard as the stronger constitutional argument, and the Fourteenth Amendment ultimately adopted their view of citizenship.
Curtis on Citizenship
Curtis went at Taney’s central historical claim directly. At the time the Constitution was ratified, he documented, Black men were recognized as citizens who could vote in at least five states.6Teaching American History. Dred Scott v. Sandford They were therefore part of the political community that formed the Union, which meant they were among “We the People.” Federal citizenship flowed from state citizenship at the founding, the opposite of what the majority claimed. Curtis also rejected the idea that constitutional meaning should be frozen at the racial attitudes of the 1780s.
McLean on Congressional Power
McLean read the Territory Clause as a general grant of legislative authority over all federal lands, not one limited to territory held in 1787. Congress had regulated and restricted slavery in various territories for decades without judicial interference, beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. That long settled practice, he argued, could not be swept aside without stronger justification than Taney offered. McLean also rejected the portable-property theory: the status of an enslaved person was governed by local law, and once Scott entered a jurisdiction where slavery was prohibited, he became free.7Justia. Strader v. Graham, 51 U.S. 82 (1851)
The Political Fallout
President James Buchanan had publicly hoped the ruling would settle the slavery question. It did the opposite. Antislavery northerners read the decision as proof that a “slave power” controlled the federal government. Southern slaveholders read it as constitutional vindication.
The Republican Party had been founded in 1854 specifically to oppose the expansion of slavery into the territories. Dred Scott effectively invalidated its central platform by declaring that Congress could not enact such a prohibition. The party grew anyway, absorbing abolitionists, antislavery Democrats, Free-Soilers, and others.
Abraham Lincoln built his 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas around the decision. In his “House Divided” speech, Lincoln identified three “working points” of what he described as machinery designed to nationalize slavery: that no person of African descent could ever be a citizen; that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could exclude slavery from any territory; and that federal courts would defer to slave states on whether residence in a free state made a person free. He warned that a future ruling could extend slavery into every state, “old as well as new, North as well as South.”
The decision also gutted Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty.” If Congress could not ban slavery in a territory, then a territorial legislature that derived its authority from Congress could not ban it either. Lincoln pressed the contradiction during their debates, and Douglas’s attempts to escape it cost him southern support and helped fracture the Democratic Party by 1860.
How the Decision Was Overturned
Dred Scott was not reversed by another Supreme Court ruling. It was reversed by the Civil War and by constitutional amendment.
The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery, declaring that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”8Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Thirteenth Amendment That dismantled Taney’s Fifth Amendment property framework. There could be no constitutional right to own people if ownership of people was itself unconstitutional.
Congress addressed the citizenship holding first by statute, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to declare that all persons born in the United States, regardless of race or previous condition of slavery, were citizens. Because an ordinary statute could be repealed, the same principle was written into the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, opens with what reads as a direct rebuttal of Taney: “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.”9Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Fourteenth Amendment Where Taney had severed state citizenship from federal citizenship and denied both to Black Americans, the amendment fused them and made birthright citizenship the default. It also applied the due process guarantee against the states, turning the same clause Taney had used to protect slaveholders into a protection for the formerly enslaved.
What Happened to Dred Scott
Scott’s personal story ended quietly. Irene Emerson had remarried a Massachusetts congressman, Calvin Chaffee, who was embarrassed to be publicly connected to the case. Chaffee arranged for ownership of the Scott family to be transferred to Taylor Blow, a St. Louis man whose family had long supported the litigation. Missouri law required a state resident to perform the emancipation. On May 26, 1857, less than three months after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Dred and Harriet Scott appeared in the St. Louis Circuit Court and were formally freed.5Missouri Digital Heritage. Missouri’s Dred Scott Case
Scott died of tuberculosis on September 17, 1858, about sixteen months after gaining his freedom.5Missouri Digital Heritage. Missouri’s Dred Scott Case Within three years of his death Lincoln was president. Within eight, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments had written the reversal of his case into the Constitution.