The Dred Scott Decision was one of the most important and controversial Supreme Court cases in American history, and it was a major milestone on the road to the Civil War.

In the 1857 landmark case, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that black Americans, regardless of whether they were free or slaves, were not citizens and had no rights under the Constitution.

Taney also ruled that the Missouri Compromise, which had determined the federal government's role in regulating slavery for decades, was unconstitutional.

The legal case, officially known as Dred Scott v. Sandford, had been filed years earlier when the slave Dred Scott asserted that he was free, as he had lived for a time in territory which did not allow slavery. The case had been unsuccessful in a Missouri court, and later moved into the federal court system.

The U.S. Supreme Court chose to take the case in 1856, at a time of intense controversy over slavery. Congress had not been able to settle the slavery issue, and the Supreme Court apparently felt the need to weigh in. When the decision was announced, on March 6, 1857, it set off a firestorm.

The court’s decision has been regarded as the greatest mistake in the history of the Supreme Court. And instead of settling the issue of slavery, it only intensified feelings on both sides of the issue, and probably hastened the onset of the Civil War.

Background of the Dred Scott Case

Dred Scott had been born in Virginia in the late 1790s, and was taken by his owner, a farmer named Peter Blow, to Alabama in 1819.

Blow eventually moved to Missouri, where slavery was legal, taking Scott with him. In 1833 Scott was sold to a surgeon in the U.S. Army, John Emerson, who was living in St. Louis.

Dr. Emerson moved on to Army postings, taking Dred Scott with him. From 1834 to 1836 Emerson and Scott lived in Illinois, a free state. They then moved onward to Fort Snelling, a military outpost in the Wisconsin Territory (in what today would be Minnesota). In 1838 they returned to Missouri.

A few years later Dr. Emerson died, leaving Dred Scott to his wife. Mrs. Emerson moved from Missouri to New York, leaving Scott behind, with members of the Blow family, relatives of his original owner.

As Dred Scott had spent years living in free territory, he went to court to seek his freedom. And in January 1850 a Missouri court ruled that Dred Scott was free. However, when his owner appealed, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the ruling in 1852.

In 1854 Mrs. Emerson arranged to sell Dred Scott to her brother, John Sanford, and his name, though misspelled as “Sandford,” became attached to the legal case. As Sanford was a citizen of New York, Scott (who was receiving financial help and encouragement from sympathizers during his legal quest for freeom) was able to sue him in federal court. Dred Scott's attorneys argued that because he had lived in free territory, he should be considered free.

A federal court ruled that Scott, as a slave, was not a citizen of Missouri, and therefore could not bring a suit in federal court. Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court and the Dred Scott Case

The case of Dred Scott was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in February 1856. The justices, noting the election year, and the volatile climate in the country, chose to wait to make a decision until after the 1856 presidential election. Oral arguments were again heard in December 1856.

The justices tended to make their decisions along sectional lines. Seven of the justices were pro-slavery, and favored a narrow ruling that Missouri had the right to decide if Dred Scott was a citizen and if he was a free man.

Two justices, Benjamin R. Curtis and John McLean, were anti-slavery, and planned to issue dissenting opinions. The seven justices ruling against Scott all issued their own opinions, but the opinion of Chief Justice Taney was widely considered the official ruling of the court.

The court announced its decision on March 6, 1857, two days after the inauguration of President James Buchanan. Chief Justice Taney read his decision in the Supreme Court chamber, which was, at that time, still inside the U.S. Capitol.

Opinion of Justice Taney

The chief justice wrote a controversial decision which actually went beyond the scope of the original case.

He ruled that Dred Scott, or any other slave, or descendant of a slave, could not be a citizen of the United States.

Taney claimed that the founders of the nation did not consider slaves of African descent to be equal to whites. And about African Americans, he wrote:

"They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.
"He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race.

"It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics which no one thought of disputing or supposed to be open to dispute, and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion."

With this unmistakably racist tone, Taney ruled that Dred Scott was not free, was not a citizen, and had no rights under the Constitution.

And, in his opinion, Taney went on to rule that Scott had never been free while in free territory, as he was property. And denying his owner of his property would violate the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Continuing, Taney ruled that the ban on slavery in some territories set decades earlier by the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

Reaction to Justice Taney’s Decision

The decision had been greatly anticipated, and reports of Justice Taney’s opinion moved quickly across the telegraph wires and appeared in the next day’s newspapers. The New York Tribune, whose editor, Horace Greeley, had joined the anti-slavery Republican Party, denounced it in dismissive terms.

The Baltimore Sun, in an article published on March 8, 1857, two days after the decision was announced, said: ”The decision just made in the Dred Scott case, an obscure African, by the Supreme Court of the United States, is probably the most important that ever emanated from that highest tribunal of our country.”

The following day, March 10, 1857, the Baltimore Sun devoted most of its front page to printing Chief Justice Taney’s decision. The headline at the top of the front page read, “Unconstitutionality of the Missouri Compromise.”

A week later, in South Carolina, a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment, the Charleston Mercury published an editorial March 14, 1857 essentially declaring that the sectional conflicts had been settled.

Of course, the Republican Party, offended and energized by the Dred Scott decision, continued its organizing efforts. And in the election of 1860 the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was elected president. Lincoln's election prompted the slave states to secede from the Union, and set of the chain of events leading to the Civil War.