In Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that Black Americans, whether free or enslaved, could never be citizens of the United States, and that Congress had no constitutional power to ban slavery in federal territories. The decision struck down the Missouri Compromise, treated enslaved people as constitutionally protected property, and is widely regarded as one of the worst rulings the Court has ever issued. It was overturned by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments within about a decade.
Who Dred Scott Was
Dred Scott was an enslaved man owned by Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon. Beginning in 1834, Emerson took Scott from Missouri to a military post in Illinois, a free state, and later to Fort Snelling in the northern Louisiana Territory, where the Missouri Compromise banned slavery. Scott lived in free territory for roughly four years before being brought back to Missouri in 1838.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
In 1846, Scott and his wife Harriet sued for their freedom in a St. Louis court, arguing that years of residence in free territory had made them legally free. A jury eventually ruled in his favor, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed, breaking with the state’s own precedent. Scott refiled in federal court, and the case reached the Supreme Court.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Dred Scott v. Sandford The defendant’s name, John Sanford, was misspelled in the official record as “Sandford,” which is why the case carries that spelling today.
The Ruling That Black Americans Could Not Be Citizens
Chief Justice Roger Taney opened the majority opinion with a threshold question: could a federal court even hear the case? Under Article III of the Constitution, federal courts can decide disputes between citizens of different states.3Congress.gov. Article III Section 2 If Scott was not a citizen, he had no standing in federal court.
Taney concluded that no person of African descent, free or enslaved, qualified as a citizen under the Constitution. His argument was historical: at the founding, he claimed, Black people were regarded as “a subordinate and inferior class of beings” with no rights that white citizens were obligated to respect. In his reading, the framers never intended the word “citizen” to include people of African ancestry, and extending constitutional protections to Black Americans would produce consequences the framers never envisioned, such as the rights to travel freely, speak publicly, and bear arms.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Dred Scott v. Sandford
The opinion drew a sharp line between state and national citizenship. A state could grant rights to anyone within its borders, but that did not make the person a citizen of the United States or entitle them to sue in federal court. Free Black residents of northern states who voted and owned property were, in the Court’s view, still locked out of the federal judiciary.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The Missouri Compromise Struck Down
Having declared Scott was not a citizen, Taney could have dismissed the case and stopped there. He did not. The majority went on to address whether Congress had the power to ban slavery in federal territories at all.
The Constitution gives Congress authority to “make all needful Rules and Regulations” for federal territory.4Congress.gov. Constitution Annotated – Article IV Section 3 Taney read this narrowly, arguing it applied only to territory the government held when the Constitution was ratified, not land acquired later through the Louisiana Purchase or other expansions. Under this reading, Congress had no general power to regulate slavery in the western territories.
On that basis, the Court declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional. That law had drawn a line across the Louisiana Territory at the 36°30′ parallel, banning slavery north of it, and had held the peace between free and slave states for more than thirty years. Taney rejected it, reasoning that Congress could not pass a law stripping citizens of their property simply because they moved into a particular territory.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Dred Scott v. Sandford
The Fifth Amendment Property Argument
The majority leaned heavily on the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which prohibits the government from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”5Congress.gov. Constitution of the United States – Fifth Amendment Under the legal framework of 1857, enslaved people were classified as personal property. Taney treated that classification as a constitutional given and argued that any federal law automatically stripping a slaveholder of that property when they crossed into a free territory amounted to an unconstitutional taking.
This was one of the earliest uses of the Due Process Clause as a limit on the substance of legislation rather than on the fairness of legal proceedings. The Court prioritized the ownership interests of slaveholders over the freedom claims of enslaved people, reasoning that a slaveholder’s property rights traveled across every state and territorial boundary. Residence in a free territory, the Court held, could not permanently change the legal status of an enslaved person.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Dred Scott v. Sandford
The Dissents
Justices Benjamin Curtis and John McLean each wrote forceful dissents.
Curtis attacked Taney’s historical claim directly. Free Black men were recognized as citizens in at least five states when the Constitution was adopted, he wrote, and were therefore “among those for whom and whose posterity the Constitution was ordained and established.” The Constitution, Curtis argued, was not “made exclusively by the white race” or exclusively for it. He found no provision that stripped citizenship from any class of people who held it at ratification, and no power authorizing Congress to do so afterward.6Teaching American History. Dred Scott v. Sandford
McLean argued that the majority had no business reaching the merits after declaring it lacked jurisdiction. If Scott was not a citizen and the Court could not hear the case, the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise was not properly before it. He also noted that Black men already exercised voting rights in multiple states, cutting against the majority’s claim that the founding generation universally excluded them from the political community.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Dred Scott v. Sandford
What Happened to Dred Scott
The Court’s formal order was straightforward: because Scott lacked standing as a citizen, the lower federal court had never had jurisdiction. The Supreme Court directed the circuit court to dismiss the case. His freedom claim was thrown out on procedural grounds before the substance could be decided.1National Archives. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
In May 1857, two months after the decision, Taylor Blow, a member of the family that had originally owned Scott, purchased Dred and Harriet and set them free. Scott lived as a free man for roughly sixteen months before dying on September 17, 1858.
How the Reconstruction Amendments Overturned the Decision
The Civil War settled by force what the Court had tried to settle by law, and the Reconstruction Amendments wrote the result into the Constitution.
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, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”7National Archives. 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – Abolition of Slavery (1865) That destroyed the legal foundation of Taney’s Fifth Amendment analysis. If no person could be enslaved, no person could be property, and the framework of slaveholder property rights collapsed.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 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.”8Congress.gov. Fourteenth Amendment That clause overturned every element of Taney’s citizenship analysis. Birthright citizenship no longer depended on race or ancestry. The amendment also prohibited states from denying any person due process or equal protection of the laws, extending those guarantees well beyond the narrow property-rights reading Taney had given the Fifth Amendment.
Together, the two amendments did not merely reverse Dred Scott v. Sandford. They made its reasoning constitutionally impossible to repeat.