By: Jordan Meadows
Staff Writer
In the early 19th century, a significant political conflict emerged over forming new U.S. states from the territory the United States had acquired from France in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The controversy revolved around whether these new states would be “free” states, where slavery would be outlawed as in the Northern states, or “slave” states, where slavery would remain legal as in the Southern states.
In 1820, Congress passed the “Missouri Compromise” to resolve the conflict. This legislation admitted Maine as a free state and created Missouri from a portion of the Louisiana Purchase territory, admitting it as a slave state. At the same time, the Compromise prohibited slavery in territories north of the southern border line of Missouri, like present-day Montana, Iowa, and Nebraska.
Dred Scott, born into slavery in Virginia around 1799, was owned by Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon. After Scott resided and worked in multiple “free” states for his traveling owner, he sought to purchase his and his family’s freedom in 1846. When Irene Emerson, Dr. Emerson’s widow, refused his offer, Scott pursued legal action to secure his freedom.
Scott, with the assistance of his legal advisors, filed a lawsuit for his freedom in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County on April 6, 1846. A separate petition was also filed for his wife, Harriet, making them the first married couple in Missouri’s history to jointly file freedom suits. The Scotts received financial support from the family of Dred’s former owner, Peter Blow.
It was initially expected that the Scotts would win their freedom relatively easily, as by 1846, numerous freedom suits had been successfully won in Missouri by former slaves. Most of these cases were based on the argument that the individuals, or their mothers, had previously lived in free states or territories.
Notable legal precedents included Winny v. Whitesides (1824): the Missouri Supreme Court had ruled that a person brought into Missouri after having lived in Illinois, where slavery was illegal, was automatically free due to their residence in a free state. Similarly, in Rachel v. Walker (1834), the state supreme court had ruled that a U.S. Army officer who took a slave to a military post in a free territory and kept her there for several years had “forfeited” his ownership.
The fact that Scott had lived in free territory was supported by witness testimonies, and it seemed clear that his case would follow the precedents set by previous cases. However, the legal journey dragged on for seven years, passing through two state supreme court appeals and two circuit court trials. The case seemed increasingly hopeless, and as the costs of the lengthy legal battle mounted, the Blow family could no longer afford to support Scott’s case. In 1850, the jury in the St. Louis Circuit Court quickly returned a verdict in favor of Dred Scott, nominally making him a free man. However, Emerson appealed that ruling to the state Supreme Court.
On March 22, 1852, Judge William Scott announced the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision, ruling that Dred Scott remained a slave and reversing the trial court’s judgment. Although Judge Scott acknowledged that the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition of slavery was “absolute,” he limited this to the territory in question, meaning that a slave could become free only if they crossed into a free state, but not necessarily. By rejecting the court’s earlier precedents, Judge Scott argued that being “once free” did not guarantee permanent freedom.
Dred Scott lost both of his original lawyers—Alexander Field, who moved to Louisiana, and David Hall, who passed away. In 1853, Dred Scott filed another lawsuit, this time against his new owner, John Sanford, in federal court. Sanford had moved to New York, giving the federal courts jurisdiction.
Historians later revealed that, after the Supreme Court had heard arguments in the Dred Scott case but before issuing a ruling, President-elect James Buchanan reached out to his friend, Supreme Court Associate Justice John Catron, to inquire whether the case would be decided before his inauguration. Buchanan hoped that a ruling would settle the growing unrest over slavery in the nation by removing the issue from political debate. He later exerted pressure on Associate Justice Robert Cooper Grier, a Northerner, to join the Southern majority in the decision, aiming to avoid the appearance that the ruling was divided along sectional lines.
In his inaugural address, Buchanan declared that the issue of slavery would be “speedily and finally settled” by the Supreme Court. On March 6, 1857, the Court delivered its 7–2 decision against Dred Scott.
Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion began by addressing a question that had nothing to do with Scott’s case: whether Black people could be considered federal citizens under the U.S. Constitution.
“We think ... that they [black people] 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. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America’s founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them,” Taney argued.
Furthermore, Taney declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, marking the first time since Marbury v. Madison (1803) that the Supreme Court had struck down a federal law, although the Missouri Compromise had already been effectively repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
The Court ruled that because the Louisiana Territory was not part of the United States at the time the Constitution was ratified, Congress did not have the authority to ban slavery in that territory. As a result, the Missouri Compromise exceeded the scope of Congress’s powers and was deemed unconstitutional. Therefore, Dred Scott remained a slave, regardless of his residence in the supposedly free Northwest Territory. Additionally, Scott was still considered a slave under Missouri law, which had proper authority over the matter. Based on these grounds, the Court concluded that Scott could not file a lawsuit in U.S. federal court.
Justices Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean dissented from the Court’s decision, each writing a separate opinion. Curtis argued that, at the time of the Constitution’s adoption in 1789, Black men had the right to vote in five of the 13 states. This, according to Curtis, made them citizens both of their individual states and of the United States. Curtis’s dissent was considered “extremely persuasive,” leading Taney to delay issuing the decision for several weeks. McLean, on the other hand, contended that once the Court had determined it lacked jurisdiction to hear Scott’s case, it should have dismissed the action outright, rather than making a ruling on the merits of black people’s citizenship status.
Abraham Lincoln, who was quickly rising as a leading figure in Illinois and would be elected President three years later, strongly criticized the Court’s majority opinion, which affirmed that “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.” Lincoln pointed out that the Constitution never referred to slaves as property, but instead explicitly called them “persons.”
Frederick Douglass, a leading Black abolitionist, considered the decision unconstitutional and believed Taney’s reasoning contradicted the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Douglass predicted that the ruling would intensify the national conflict over slavery.
The economic consequences of the decision were immediate: east-west railroads went bankrupt, causing part of the Panic of 1857. And Southerners, already uneasy with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, seized on the ruling to argue that they had a constitutional right to bring slaves into the territories, regardless of local laws.
Although Democrats believed the decision would settle the slavery issue by transforming it into a matter of settled law, it had the opposite effect. It galvanized Northern opposition to slavery, split the Democratic Party along sectional lines, emboldened Southern secessionists, and strengthened the Republican Party. By 1860, the Republican Party had explicitly rejected the Dred Scott decision in its platform.
The eventual emancipation of Dred Scott and his family made national news and was celebrated in Northern cities. Scott later worked as a hotel porter in St. Louis, where he became a minor local celebrity. Dred Scott died of tuberculosis on November 7, 1858—less than two years after the Supreme Court’s decision and over 12 years after his first lawsuit filing.
