Dred Scott decision

(March 6, 1857), ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court that made slavery legal in all the territories, thereby adding fuel to the sectional controversy and pushing the nation along the road to civil war.

The decision—only the second time in the nation's history that the Supreme Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional—was a clear victory for the slaveholding South. Southerners had argued that both Congress and the territorial legislature were powerless to exclude slavery from a territory. Only a state could exclude slavery, they maintained.

Dred Scott was a slave whose master in 1834 had taken him from Missouri (a slave state) to Illinois (a free state), then into the Wisconsin Territory (a free territory under the provisions of the Missouri Compromise), and finally back to Missouri. In 1846, with the help of antislavery lawyers, Scott sued for his freedom in the Missouri state courts on the grounds that his residence in a free state and a free territory had made him a free man.

The Missouri Supreme Court overturned an initial ruling by a lower court which had declared Scott free, and the case, then, began a long sojourn up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court announced its decision on March 6, 1857, just two days after the inauguration of Pres. James Buchanan. Though each justice wrote a separate opinion, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's opinion is most often cited on account of its far-reaching implications for the sectional crisis.

Taney, one of the seven justices denying Scott his freedom (two dissented), declared that a Negro could not be entitled to rights as a U.S. citizen, such as the right to sue in federal courts. In fact, Taney wrote, Negroes had “no rights which any white man was bound to respect.”

The decision might have ended there, with the dismissal of Scott's appeal. But Taney and the other justices in the majority went on to declare that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which had forbidden slavery in that part of the Louisiana Purchase north of the latitude 36°30¢, except for Missouri) was unconstitutional because Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Slaves were property, and masters were guaranteed their property rights under the Fifth Amendment. Neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could deprive a citizen of his property without due process of law. As for Scott's temporary residence in a free state, Illinois, the majority said that Scott had still been subject then to Missouri law.

The Dred Scott decision seemed a mortal blow to the newly created Republican Party, formed to halt the extension of slavery into the western territories. It also forced Stephen A. Douglas, advocate of popular sovereignty (q.v.), to come up with a method (the “Freeport Doctrine”) whereby settlers could actually ban slavery from their midst. President Buchanan, the South, and the majority of the Supreme Court hoped that the Dred Scott decision would mark the end of antislavery agitation. Instead, the decision increased antislavery sentiment in the North, strengthened the Republican Party, and fed the sectional antagonism that burst into war in 1861.