Five-minute digest
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Summary
Dred Scott was held as a slave by Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon who took him in the 1830s to the free state of Illinois and then to Fort Snelling, in a part of the Wisconsin Territory where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 forbade slavery. There Scott married Harriet Robinson, and the family later returned to Missouri. After Emerson's death, the Scotts sued for freedom in a St. Louis court in 1846, arguing that residence on free soil had made them free. A jury agreed in 1850, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed in 1852. Scott then sued John F. A. Sanford of New York, who claimed him through Emerson's estate (the report spells the name Sandford), in federal court, which hears suits between citizens of different states. Sanford answered with a plea that Scott could not be a citizen of Missouri because he was of African descent and his ancestors had been brought to America as slaves. Two questions reached the Supreme Court: whether a person so described could be a citizen with the right to sue in federal court, and whether Congress could prohibit slavery in a federal territory, so that residence there made Scott free. On 6 March 1857 the Court ruled against Scott, 7–2. Chief Justice Taney held that people of African descent whose ancestors were imported as slaves, whether free or enslaved, were not part of the people who made the Constitution and were not citizens of the United States. He drew this from founding-era laws and opinion, which in his reading treated them as a separate and subordinate class, from the Declaration of Independence as its authors understood it, and from the Constitution's slave-trade and fugitive-slave clauses. A state might grant its own citizenship, but could not make anyone a citizen of the United States. Taney then held that the territory clause of Article IV applied only to lands held in 1787, that Congress's power over later territories was bounded by the Fifth Amendment's protection of property, and that the Missouri Compromise prohibition was therefore void. Scott's status after returning to Missouri was governed by Missouri law. Justices McLean and Curtis dissented. Justice Curtis answered that free men of African descent were citizens of at least five states when the Constitution was ratified and voted on its adoption, and that anyone born a citizen of a state is a citizen of the United States. The library text contains Taney's opinion and an excerpt of Curtis's dissent that covers citizenship and breaks off before his discussion of the territories; the other opinions and footnotes are omitted. The decision became a central issue in the 1858 Illinois Senate race and the 1860 election. Scott and his family were freed by private manumission in May 1857. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth (1868) declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the nation and of their state, superseding the decision's citizenship holding.
Top Lessons
Original understanding as a method
Taney insisted that the Constitution must be read as its framers understood it, and he built his citizenship holding on a survey of founding-era laws and opinion. Curtis used the same method and reached the opposite answer by pointing to states where free men of African descent voted. The case shows that a shared method does not settle disputed history.
Two kinds of citizenship
The opinion separates citizenship of a state from citizenship of the United States, and holds that a state cannot make anyone a national citizen. Curtis rejects the separation for those born citizens of a state. The Fourteenth Amendment later defined national citizenship by birth or naturalization and made state citizenship follow from residence.
Can a court settle a national dispute?
President Buchanan and others hoped the Court would end the controversy over slavery in the territories. The decision instead became a central issue in the debates of 1858 and the election of 1860, illustrating the limits of judicial authority over questions that divide a whole people.
Persistence in the courts
Dred and Harriet Scott pursued their claims from 1846 to 1857 through trial, appeal, a new federal suit and two arguments in Washington. Their case is a reminder that great constitutional decisions begin with particular families and long, costly litigation.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen?”
Frequently cited
“We think they are not, and that they 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.”
“And an act of Congress which deprives a citizen of the United States of his liberty or property, merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States, and who had committed no offence against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.”
“Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void; and that neither Dred Scott himself, nor any of his family, were made free by being carried into this territory; even if they had been carried there by the owner, with the intention of becoming a permanent resident.”
“These colored persons were not only included in the body of 'the people of the United States,' by whom the Constitution was ordained and established, but in at least five of the States they had the power to act, and doubtless did act, by their suffrages, upon the question of its adoption.”
Frequently cited
“And my opinion is, that, under the Constitution of the United States, every free person born on the soil of a State, who is a citizen of that State by force of its Constitution or laws, is also a citizen of the United States.”
Medical Lens
John Emerson's work as an army surgeon explains the moves between military posts that gave rise to the suit, but neither opinion in the library text discusses medicine.