On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford by a 7–2 vote, holding that people of African descent could not be United States citizens and that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the federal territories.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote the majority opinion. The ruling is remembered as one of the most condemned decisions in American judicial history, and it was overturned by constitutional amendment within a decade.
How the Case Reached the Supreme Court
Dred Scott, an enslaved man, filed a freedom suit in the St. Louis Circuit Court in April 1846, signing his petition with an “X.”2Missouri Secretary of State. Missouri State Archives – Missouri’s Dred Scott Case, 1846-1857 Scott and his wife Harriet argued they were legally free because they had lived at Fort Snelling, in territory where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery. Under a longstanding Missouri legal tradition, enslaved people who had resided on free soil could sue for their liberty on the theory that time in free territory permanently changed their status.
The trial court ruled for Scott. In 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed, breaking with its own earlier decisions.3Justia. Dred Scott v. Sandford Ownership had by then passed to John F.A. Sandford, whose name was misspelled in the court record and became attached to the case. Because Sandford lived in New York and Scott in Missouri, Scott refiled in federal court on diversity-of-citizenship grounds. The case reached the Supreme Court and was argued twice before the decision came down on March 6, 1857.
The Ruling on Citizenship
Taney’s opinion began with a threshold question: could Scott even sue in federal court? Federal jurisdiction over the case depended on Scott being a citizen of a state. Taney held he was not. The opinion concluded that people of African descent, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States and could never become citizens under the Constitution as the framers had understood it.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The consequences were sweeping. Even a Black person freed under state law had no standing to bring a federal lawsuit, because federal citizenship was treated as wholly separate from any rights a state might grant.3Justia. Dred Scott v. Sandford An entire population was shut out of the federal courts. Having reached that conclusion, Taney could have dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction. He kept going.
Striking Down the Missouri Compromise
Taney next held that Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in the federal territories.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) That holding struck down the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had banned slavery north of a line drawn across the western territories. The reasoning treated enslaved people as property protected by the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. On this view, any federal law freeing an enslaved person brought into a territory was an unconstitutional seizure of the owner’s property.3Justia. Dred Scott v. Sandford
The logic also undermined the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. If Congress itself could not ban slavery in a territory, it was unclear how a territorial legislature created by Congress could do so. The decision told the anti-slavery movement that short of a constitutional amendment, no political route could restrict slavery’s expansion.
The Dissents
Justices Benjamin Curtis and John McLean dissented. Curtis argued that free Black people born in the United States were citizens of their states when the Constitution was ratified, and that state citizenship carried the right to sue in federal court. He noted that Black citizens had voted in several states during the founding era, which cut against Taney’s account of the framers’ intent. On the Missouri Compromise, Curtis pointed to a chain of congressional action over slavery in the territories reaching back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and read the Constitution’s territories clause as broad enough to authorize such laws.
McLean, who had long viewed slavery as a violation of fundamental rights, argued that any person born in the United States became a citizen upon obtaining freedom.4Supreme Court of Ohio. John McLean
Political Consequences
The decision hit an already inflamed political conflict. Abolitionists denounced it. The newly formed Republican Party, organized around keeping slavery out of the territories, read the ruling as evidence that the slaveholding South controlled the federal courts. Abraham Lincoln returned to the case repeatedly in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, warning that its logic could eventually force free states to accept slavery within their own borders. Southerners treated the decision as vindication; Northerners treated it as judicial overreach. Historians commonly count the ruling among the events that made the Civil War increasingly unavoidable.
How the Decision Was Overturned
Two constitutional amendments dismantled the ruling. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on December 6, 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.”5National Archives. 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) That collapsed the property-rights framework Taney had built on the Fifth Amendment.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, directly reversed the citizenship holding. Its opening sentence states: “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.”6Constitution Annotated. Fourteenth Amendment That language was written to erase the rule that people of African descent could never be American citizens.
What Happened to Dred Scott
Scott was freed within months of losing his case. The sons of Peter Blow, his original owner and a childhood friend, arranged for his emancipation in May 1857. Scott worked as a hotel porter in St. Louis and died on September 17, 1858, roughly eighteen months after the Court declared he had no right to sue for his freedom. He did not live to see the amendments that vindicated his claim.