In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that no person of African descent could be a citizen of the United States, that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in federal territories, and that enslaved people were property protected by the Fifth Amendment. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion struck down the Missouri Compromise, closed the federal courts to Black Americans regardless of whether they were free or enslaved, and inflamed the sectional crisis that led to the Civil War. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments later reversed the decision at the constitutional level. Legal scholars widely regard it as the worst ruling the Court has ever issued.1The National Archives describes the Dred Scott decision as “considered by many legal scholars to be the worst ever rendered by the Supreme Court.”
Who Dred Scott Was
Dred Scott was an enslaved man owned by Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon. In 1834, Emerson brought Scott from Missouri to the military post at Rock Island, Illinois, a free state. Two years later, Emerson moved him to Fort Snelling in the northern Louisiana Territory, above the latitude line where the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery. Scott lived on free soil for several years before Emerson returned him to Missouri.
In 1846, Scott and his wife Harriet sued in St. Louis Circuit Court, arguing that their residence in free jurisdictions had ended their enslavement. Scott won at trial, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed, and he then filed a new federal lawsuit against John Sanford, the brother-in-law of Emerson’s widow, who claimed ownership of the Scott family. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court on a writ of error from the federal circuit court in Missouri.
The Three Holdings
Sanford’s lawyers raised a threshold objection: Scott could not sue in federal court because he was not a citizen. Federal courts hear disputes between citizens of different states, so if Scott was not a citizen of Missouri, the case had to be dismissed. Taney used that procedural question as the launching point for a sweeping ruling that resolved three separate issues at once.
Black Americans Could Not Be Citizens
Taney held that people of African descent “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.” The bar applied to free Black Americans as well as the enslaved. Ancestry, not legal status, was the disqualifying factor.
Taney grounded the conclusion in a reading of history. He argued that the authors of the Declaration of Independence did not mean to include people of African descent when they wrote that “all men are created equal,” because that group “were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings.” He pointed to colonial-era laws restricting intermarriage and limiting the rights of free Black residents as evidence that the founding generation viewed Black Americans as permanently outside the political community.
Even where individual states had extended rights to free Black residents, Taney ruled that state recognition did not create federal citizenship. Scott lacked standing, and the federal courthouse doors were shut based entirely on race.
Congress Could Not Ban Slavery in the Territories
Having already concluded that Scott could not sue, the majority pressed on to reach the slavery question anyway. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had drawn a line at 36°30′ latitude, banning slavery in the northern portions of the Louisiana Purchase. Taney declared that restriction unconstitutional.
The constitutional text at issue was the Territory Clause in Article IV, which grants Congress power “to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.” Taney read that authority narrowly, arguing it applied mainly to lands the nation held at the time of the Constitution’s ratification in 1787 and did not give Congress broad governing power over territories acquired later. The majority also reasoned that the federal government acted as a trustee for all states in administering territories and could not favor free-state laws over slave-state laws.
The reasoning did more than invalidate the Missouri Compromise. It also undercut the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” from the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which had let territorial residents decide the slavery question themselves. If Congress lacked the power to restrict slavery in the territories, it could not delegate that power either. The entire framework of compromise that had managed sectional tensions for decades collapsed in a single opinion.
Enslaved People Were Protected Property
The third pillar of the ruling rested on the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the federal government from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Taney classified enslaved people as property and concluded that any federal law freeing them based on their location in a territory amounted to an unconstitutional taking. In his words, “an act of Congress which deprives a citizen of the United States of his liberty or property, merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States, and who had committed no offense against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name due process of law.”
The practical effect was severe. Moving an enslaved person across a territorial border did not change that person’s legal status. Ownership claims survived regardless of geography, because the Constitution itself was said to protect them.
The Dissents
Justices Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean each rejected the majority’s reasoning point by point.
Curtis attacked the historical account directly. When the Constitution was ratified, free Black men in five states — New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina — were citizens who voted on equal terms with white citizens. If they were citizens of their states at the founding, Curtis argued, they were necessarily part of “the people” who ratified the Constitution. Taney’s claim that the founding generation never intended to include Black Americans was wrong as a matter of historical record. Curtis also defended congressional authority over the territories, citing decades of federal statutes regulating territorial conditions, including restrictions on slavery, as evidence that the Territory Clause carried broad governing power.
McLean approached the property question differently. He argued that slavery was not a right arising from natural law or common law but “a mere municipal regulation, founded upon and limited to the range of the territorial laws.” He cited the 1772 English case of Somerset v. Stewart, which held that slavery could exist only where positive law authorized it. If slavery depended entirely on local law, then carrying an enslaved person into free territory meant the legal basis for ownership ceased to exist there. The Fifth Amendment could not protect a property interest with no legal foundation in the jurisdiction where the owner asserted it.
Political Fallout and the Road to War
The ruling did not settle the slavery question. It enraged abolitionists, free-soil advocates, and the young Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln made the decision central to his political arguments, characterizing it in his 1858 “House Divided” speech as part of a “piece of machinery” designed to nationalize slavery. Lincoln warned that a future ruling built on the same logic could declare that no state had the power to exclude slavery within its own borders.
The 1860 presidential election turned into a referendum on the decision. The Republican platform called the ruling “a dangerous political heresy,” while the Democratic platform sought to codify it. Lincoln’s election, without carrying a single Southern state, triggered secession within weeks. The decision did not cause the Civil War by itself, but it destroyed the political middle ground where compromise had previously been possible.
What Happened to the Scott Family
The Supreme Court’s ruling left Dred Scott legally enslaved, but his situation changed almost immediately. Ownership of the Scott family was transferred to Taylor Blow, a member of the St. Louis family that had originally owned Scott decades earlier. Missouri law required a state resident to free an enslaved person there, so the transfer was a necessary step. On May 26, 1857, Taylor Blow executed a deed of emancipation, and a St. Louis Circuit Court judge formally granted freedom to Dred and Harriet Scott and their daughters. Scott died of tuberculosis in September 1858, less than a year later.
How the Ruling Was Overturned
The Civil War accomplished what the courts would not. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States, 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, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The property-rights framework Taney had built under the Fifth Amendment lost its legal foundation. Human beings could no longer be treated as property.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 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.” The language was written specifically to overturn Dred Scott. Citizenship would be determined by birth on American soil, not by race or ancestry. The amendment also barred states from denying any person equal protection of the laws or depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process, extending to the states the same due process principle Taney had invoked to protect slaveholders, now redirected to protect the rights of the formerly enslaved.