In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Dred Scott, an enslaved man who had lived for years in territories where slavery was banned, was not entitled to freedom; that no person of African descent could be a citizen of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited slavery in much of the western territory, was unconstitutional. The decision is widely regarded as the worst the Supreme Court has ever issued, and it pushed the country toward the Civil War.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Who Dred Scott Was
Dred Scott was sold around 1833 to Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon. Emerson’s postings took Scott first to Fort Armstrong in Illinois, a state where slavery was banned under both the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the state constitution, and then in 1836 to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory, where the Missouri Compromise barred slavery north of the 36°30′ line.2National Park Service. Dred Scott Chronology Scott lived at Fort Snelling for several years and married Harriet Robinson there.3Minnesota Historical Society. The Dred Scott Case
The Scotts eventually returned to Missouri with Emerson. After Emerson died in 1843, his widow refused Scott’s offer to buy his family’s freedom. On April 6, 1846, Dred and Harriet Scott filed separate freedom suits in St. Louis Circuit Court, arguing that their years on free soil had ended their enslavement.4National Park Service. The Dred Scott Case What began as an ordinary Missouri freedom suit became an eleven-year fight that reached the Supreme Court after the defendant, John Sanford (misspelled “Sandford” in the case caption), established residence in New York, which allowed the case to proceed in federal court on diversity jurisdiction.5Justia. Dred Scott v. Sandford
What the Supreme Court Decided
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote the majority opinion. It reached three holdings, each broader than the last.
Black People Could Not Be U.S. Citizens
Taney treated the case first as a question of jurisdiction. Article III lets federal courts hear disputes between citizens of different states, so the threshold issue was whether Scott could be a citizen at all. Taney answered no. He wrote that the framers had never intended people of African descent, whether enslaved or free, to be part of the political community the Constitution created, and that they had been regarded at the founding as “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”5Justia. Dred Scott v. Sandford A state could grant its own residents whatever status it wished, Taney conceded, but state citizenship did not create federal citizenship. Without federal citizenship, Scott had no standing to sue.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The Missouri Compromise Was Unconstitutional
Having found no jurisdiction, the Court could have stopped. It did not. The majority pressed on to strike down the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the federal statute that had barred slavery in territories north of 36°30′.6National Archives. Missouri Compromise This was only the second time in American history that the Court had voided a major act of Congress. Taney characterized the federal government as a trustee for the states, obligated to keep the territories open to citizens and their property, and concluded that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery north of any line.7Oyez. Dred Scott v. Sandford The Compromise, he wrote, had been void from the moment it was enacted. A political bargain that had held for more than three decades was gone.
Enslaved People Were Property Protected by the Fifth Amendment
The most aggressive step came next. Taney invoked the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to hold that enslaved people were property in the constitutional sense, and that any federal law stripping a slaveholder of that property when he crossed a territorial line was unconstitutional.7Oyez. Dred Scott v. Sandford The Court drew no distinction between an enslaved human being and any other form of property. Under that logic, no territorial legislature and no act of Congress could lawfully restrict slavery anywhere in the federal territories.5Justia. Dred Scott v. Sandford
The Dissents
Two justices refused to sign on, and their opinions carried the reasoning that would eventually prevail.
Justice Curtis on Citizenship
Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis attacked Taney’s history directly. When the Constitution was ratified, Curtis wrote, free Black men were recognized as citizens with voting rights in five states: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina. If they were citizens of their states at that moment, they were citizens of the United States as well. Taney’s claim that the framers had universally excluded Black people from citizenship was, in Curtis’s account, contrary to the historical record.5Justia. Dred Scott v. Sandford Curtis resigned from the Court on September 30, 1857, months after the decision.8Justia. Justice Benjamin Curtis
Justice McLean on Slavery and Territories
Justice John McLean challenged the majority’s premise that slavery was a form of constitutionally protected property. Slavery, he wrote, was purely a creation of local law, with no foundation in natural law or common law. He quoted earlier rulings describing it as “a mere municipal regulation, founded upon and limited to the range of the territorial laws,” and wrote that property in a human being “does not arise from nature or from the common law” but exists only where local statutes create and sustain it.9Maryland State Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford: Mr. Justice McLean Dissenting McLean also maintained that Congress had plain authority to govern the territories, including the power to prohibit slavery in them, and that once an enslaved person entered a jurisdiction with no law supporting slavery, that status ended.
Reaction and Political Fallout
The decision provoked outrage across the North. Frederick Douglass denounced what he called the “infamous decision of the Slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court” and mocked the idea that the ruling had settled the slavery question, noting that “the more the question has been settled, the more it has needed settling.” Douglass said the Court treated enslaved people as “property in the same sense that horses, sheep, and swine are” and warned that the federal government had now pledged itself to “support, defend, and propagate the crying curse of human bondage.”
Politically, the ruling backfired on the interests it was written to protect. By invalidating the young Republican Party’s core platform of stopping slavery’s spread into the territories, the decision expanded the party’s coalition. Radical abolitionists, antislavery Democrats, and Free-Soilers all moved toward the Republican banner. The 1860 Republican platform expressly repudiated the ruling and denied that Congress, any territorial legislature, or any individual could give slavery legal existence in any territory. The convention nominated Abraham Lincoln, a moderate whose opposition to the decision was well known. Lincoln won the presidency with about 40 percent of the popular vote, carrying every northern state except New Jersey; his name did not appear on the ballot in ten slaveholding states. Within weeks of his election, southern states began seceding.
What Happened to Dred Scott
On May 26, 1857, less than three months after the ruling, Taylor Blow, a member of the family that had originally owned Scott, purchased and emancipated Scott and his family. Scott took a job as a porter at a St. Louis hotel. He died of tuberculosis on September 17, 1858, having lived barely a year as a free man.
How the Ruling Was Overturned
The decision was never formally overruled by a later Supreme Court case. It did not need to be. The Civil War amendments made the entire ruling a dead letter. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery: “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.”10National Archives. 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, answered Taney’s citizenship holding in language that left no room for reading: “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.”11Constitution Annotated. Fourteenth Amendment
The case remains, in the assessment of the National Archives and most legal historians, the worst decision the Supreme Court has ever rendered.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)