The Dred Scott Case - Summary
Slavery divided Americans
from the earliest beginnings of our country. It was a major issue in
the
Civil War, as well as in the Dred Scott court decision of 1857, which
was a key factor leading up to that war between the states.
By 1818, when the people of the Missouri Territory requested statehood, half of the existing states forbade slavery, while the other half allowed it. Missouri wanted to allow slavery, but the United States Congress, the legislative body that granted statehood, sought to keep a balance between slave states and free states. In 1820 a compromise was made; the balance would be maintained by admitting Maine as a free state but permitting slavery in Missouri. However, a Missouri state law did allow slaves to petition the courts for their freedom if they could prove they had been wrongly enslaved. Many attempted this route to freedom, and some of them succeeded. A frequent basis for a slave’s case was that he or she had been a resident of a free territory. This was what Dred Scott argued when, in 1846, he sued in the courts for freedom for himself and his family.
Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia around 1799. (Slaves’ births often went unrecorded.) As the slave of Peter Blow, Scott moved with Blow’s household to St. Louis. When Blow died in the early 1830s, Scott was sold to army surgeon John Emerson. Dr. Emerson’s unit moved to Illinois, then to the Wisconsin Territory (now Minnesota). Slavery was prohibited in both places, but many army officers brought their enslaved people along to posts in free territories. In 1836, Scott and another slave of Dr. Emerson’s, named Harriet Robinson, were married at Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory.
By 1842, the Scotts were back in St. Louis, as Dr. Emerson relocated to Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis. When Dr. Emerson died in 1843, his widow inherited Dred and Harriet. Scott later said he had tried to buy his freedom from Mrs. Emerson. When she refused, he and his wife filed a lawsuit in the Missouri court on April 6, 1846. The jury ruled against the Scotts, and their lawyers asked for a retrial. The second trial came before the St. Louis court on January 12, 1850. This time, the jury decided that Dred Scott should be free because he had lived in free territory with Dr. Emerson. However, Mrs. Emerson, with her lawyers and family members, did not give up; she appealed the decision. It took two more years before the court ruled on the Emerson appeal.
Sometime during those two years, Mrs. Emerson evidently sold the Scotts to her brother, John Sandford, who lived in New York. Because the suit now concerned two states, New York and Missouri, the Scotts could bring their suit to the federal courts instead of the state court in Missouri. First, the case Dred Scott v. John Sandford had to make its way through the United States Circuit Court for the District of Missouri. Therefore, it was more than four years later, on December 30, 1854, that the United States Supreme Court officially agreed to hear Scott v. Sandford. The Supreme Court had many other cases to decide, and Dred Scott’s was delayed until February 1856.
Dred Scott’s quest for freedom had expanded far beyond an individual’s petition. By 1856, slavery was an issue that caused turmoil and much bloodshed between advocates of slavery and “free soil” supporters. Lawyers on both sides of Scott v. Sandford delivered arguments to the court that involved the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and whether Congress could limit slavery in western territories. In May 1856 the court ordered that those arguments be resubmitted, and the date for rearguing Scott v. Sandford was set for December of that year. Even then, the Supreme Court justices could not meet to form their decision until February of the following year.
On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney announced the court’s decision to an eager audience packed into the courtroom. The reading took two hours. By its end, Dred Scott had been declared a noncitizen, as had all people who were “descendants of African born slaves,” and therefore not entitled to bring a lawsuit before the court. Judge Taney ruled that he had not become free as a result of living in free territories, because he had returned to Missouri where slavery was legal. African American people, according to the Supreme Court, had no rights before the law. Slavery was still legal, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional.
The issue of slavery was settled only after a four-year civil war that resulted in the deaths of 600,000 Americans and wounds that our country can still feel. In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was ratified; it stated, “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude...shall exist within the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, declared that “all people born or naturalized in the United States...are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” And that definitely included descendants of African-born slaves.
Soon after the Supreme Court decision of 1857, Taylor Blow, a descendant of Peter Blow, who had first owned Dred Scott, acquired Scott and his family and gave them their freedom. Scott died a few months later, on September 17, 1858, still with no guaranteed protection of his freedom, but at least a free man.
Summary of Decision
Dred Scott Portrait
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