In his statement Taney made two significant rulings. First, he stated that blacks could never be citizens, even if free, and thus could not sue in federal courts. Second, he determined that Congress lacked the power to prohibit slavery in any federal territories, making significant portions of the Missouri Compromise of unconstitutional. Read the full original text of the Dred Scott decision. Instead of removing slavery as a major political debate, the decision further exacerbated sectional tensions and became a key issue in the and political campaigns.
Dred Scott died from tuberculosis on September 17, , not living to see the end of slavery and the invalidation of his Supreme Court case. But soon after the decision, it became public knowledge that his current owner, Irene Emerson, was also the wife of an abolitionist congressman from Massachusetts, Dr. Calvin C. Chaffee, who claimed to have no knowledge of owning Scott, transferred ownership of Scott, his wife Harriet Scott, and their two daughters to the Blows, and they freed him on May 26, Scott lived just over a year of his life in freedom.
Since then, Dred Scott v. Sandford has become infamous as one of the most reviled legal decisions made by the U. Supreme Court, but the ruling cannot be untangled from the prevailing political, economic, and social atmosphere of the United States in the lates. While Dred Scott did not directly cause the Civil War, the case cannot be discounted as a major tailwind on the path toward war. Finkelman, Paul. Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents.
Boston: Bedford Books, Athens: Ohio University Press, Maltz, Earl M. California was then admitted as a free state, but it had to agree to have one pro-Slave member in the Senate to maintain a free state-slave state balance.
It allowed for free, white male citizens of the two territories to decide if they would apply for admission as a free or a slave state. Violence broke out in Kansas, which delayed its admission to the Union. The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by the Supreme Court in found that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Roger Taney and six other Justices ruled that Missouri Compromise was illegal because Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories, and slave masters were guaranteed property rights under the Fifth Amendment.
At the trial they called Mrs. Russell, who testified that Irene Emerson was the owner of the Scotts. Judge Hamilton gave a charge based on the Winny case that required a verdict for the Scotts if the jury found that they had resided either in a free state or in a territory in which the Missouri Compromise barred slavery, which they indisputably had.
The jury found in favor of the Scotts. Irene Emerson appealed the case to the Missouri Supreme Court, where it was heard in The timing could not have been worse for the Scotts because sectional conflict over slavery had begun to boil over.
In an opinion filled with resentful language, the Missouri Supreme Court, by a vote of , reversed the judgment freeing the Scotts. The court repudiated its rulings in the Winny v. Whitesides and Rachel v. But this persistent slave managed to find new lawyers to take up his cause. His adversary had also changed — Irene Emerson had remarried and left St.
Louis after an ill-fated marriage to a much younger woman. Field filed a new suit in federal court on the basis of Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, commonly known as the diversity clause, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over suits between citizens of different states.
It was not a far-fetched theory because several Southern courts had recognized that the act of emancipation conferred at least some citizenship rights on a freed slave. Scott v. The lawsuit again asserted that Scott had been freed by his residence in Illinois and at Fort Snelling. The case was assigned to Judge Robert W. Wells, a Virginian who had been attorney general of Missouri. While Scott had convinced the court that it had the jurisdiction to hear his case, he still had to prove that his travels to Illinois and Fort Snelling had freed him under the law of Missouri.
The case went to trial in Judge Wells, though sympathetic to the Scotts, had no choice but to give a charge that reflected the ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court in Scott v. Emerson , since the federal case concerned solely a wrongful imprisonment charge and Scott had never proven unequivocally in any state case that he was declared free in Illinois.
Sitting on that highest court were four slave state justices, four justices from free states and Roger Taney from Maryland, a border state that permitted slavery.
It is easy in hindsight to see why the Scott lawyers might have viewed Taney as a possible fifth vote in their favor. As a young lawyer, Taney had defended an abolitionist minister against charges of inciting slaves to rebellion.
Taney had freed his own slaves and, after joining the Supreme Court, voted to free the slaves in the Amistad case. In appearance he was frail and soft-spoken, to some resembling an old wizard, but his eyes shone with bright and piercing intelligence. The case was argued in the Supreme Court in and again in late , just as Americans began to debate slavery with more than words. On May 21, , border ruffians sacked the free-state town of Lawrence, Kan.
The Scott case also coincided with tragedy in the Taney family. In the summer that the case reached the Supreme Court, an outbreak of cholera was reported in Norfolk.
Her mother died of a stroke the same day. Taney, then 78 years old, had begun writing his autobiography at Old Point Comfort. Taney was leaving Old Point, the scene of many happy summers and of one terrible tragedy, never to return, and the writing of the story of his life, which had begun there, was never to be resumed.
After the first argument, it was clear that Geyer and Johnson were defending nothing less than slavery itself. In challenging the authority of Congress to limit the expansion of slavery, the Sanford attorneys struck at the foundation of the legislative compromises that had saved the Union.
Instead of issuing an opinion, the Supreme Court set the case down for another argument in December Following the second argument, the Supreme Court was initially divided. Finally, a majority coalesced around a sweeping opinion.
At the suggestion of Justice James M. Grier to join a majority opinion. Buchanan wrote to Justice Grier, who agreed to concur with the chief justice. On March 6, , the Supreme Court was filled, and many were turned away. Taney then went on to issue a stunning ruling that attempted to end the slavery controversy forever. That morning freedom had been national and slavery local. By the afternoon, it was the other way around. The country was a tinderbox, and now the Supreme Court had lit a match.
For the first time, Northern anger was not directed only at the expansion of slavery but at the South. Southerners warned that the opinion must be accepted by the North or there would be disunion. For two months Justice Taney refused to publish his opinion, and even ordered the Supreme Court clerk not to give a copy to dissenting Justice Curtis. Meanwhile, Taney was rewriting sections of his opinion to respond to the cascade of Northern anger that had descended on the Supreme Court.
That same year, on August 27 in Freeport, Ill. Douglas held the second of their famous debates, which were largely about the Dred Scott case. At its convention, the Democratic Party came apart over the Dred Scott decision.
Lincoln ran as the sole Republican candidate for president against a fractured Democratic Party that produced three candidates, one being Stephen A.
In one of the most ironic moments in American history, Chief Justice Taney swore in Lincoln as president in In Taney sat for a portrait by the painter Emanuel Leutze. The chief justice wears black robes in the portrait. His left hand rests on a pad of paper, while his right hand hangs limply, almost lifelessly against the right arm of the chair.
His eyes are bleak, as though he had seen into a ruinous future that he had wrought, but had not intended and could never undo. Taney remained on the court during the Civil War until his death in He was described by a diarist of the time as one of the saddest figures in Washington. And what of his adversary, Dred Scott? In a bizarre turn, after she lost the trial in Scott v.
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