21 The Dred Scott Decision

6. The Dred Scott Decision
   In 1857, the slavery controversy shifted from Congress to the Supreme Court, which was about to decide a case concerning a man named Dred Scott who was enslaved in Missouri. Years earlier, Scott had traveled with his enslaver to Wisconsin, where slavery was banned by the Missouri Compromise. When he returned to Missouri, Scott went to court to win his freedom, arguing that his stay in Wisconsin had made him a free man.

Questions of the Case There were nine justices on the Supreme Court in 1857. Four justices were from the South, four were from the North, and Chief Justice Roger Taney was from Maryland, a border state that permitted slavery. The justices had two key questions to decide. First, was Dred Scott, as an enslaved man, a citizen who had the right to bring a case before a federal court? Second, did his time in Wisconsin make him a free man?

Chief Justice Taney hoped to use the Scott case to settle the slavery controversy once and for all. So he asked the Court to consider two additional questions: Did Congress have the power to make any laws at all concerning slavery in the territories? And, if so, was the Missouri Compromise a constitutional use of that power?

Nearly 80 years old, Taney had long been opposed to slavery. As a young Maryland lawyer, he had publicly declared that "slavery is a blot upon our national character and every lover of freedom confidently hopes that it will be … wiped away." Taney had freed the people he had enslaved, and many observers wondered whether he and his fellow justices would now free Dred Scott as well.

Two Judicial Bombshells On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Taney delivered the Dred Scott decision. The chief justice began by reviewing the facts of Dred Scott's case, and then he dropped the first of two judicial bombshells. By a vote of seven to two, the Court had decided that Scott could not sue for his freedom in a federal court because he was not a citizen. Nor, said Taney, could Scott become a citizen because no African American, whether free or enslaved, was an American citizen—or could ever become one.

Second, Taney declared that the Court had rejected Scott's argument that his stay in Wisconsin had made him a free man. The reason was simple. The Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

As a result of the Dred Scott decision, slavery was allowed in all territories. The Supreme Court claimed that banning slavery in certain territories was unconstitutional because it did not protect enslavers’ property rights.
Taney argued that enslaved people were property and that the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution said that property could not be taken from people without due process of law—that is, a proper court hearing. Taney reasoned that banning slavery in a territory was the same as taking property from enslavers who would like to bring the people they enslaved into that territory, which was unconstitutional. Rather than banning slavery, he said, Congress had a constitutional responsibility to protect the property rights of enslavers in a territory.

The Dred Scott decision delighted slaveholders. They hoped that, at long last, the issue of slavery in the territories had been settled—and in their favor.

Many Northerners, however, were stunned and enraged by the Court's ruling. The New York Tribune called the decision a "wicked and false judgment." The New York Independent expressed outrage in a bold headline: