What was the Dred Scott decision?

The Dred Scott decision was the 1857 Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided March 6, 1857, that held that African Americans, whether free or enslaved, were not and could not be citizens of the United States, that Dred Scott therefore had no right to sue in federal court, that Congress had no constitutional power to prohibit slavery in the territories, and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had been unconstitutional.

The case began with Dred Scott, an enslaved man owned by U.S. Army surgeon John Emerson. Emerson took Scott from the slave state of Missouri to the free state of Illinois in 1836 and then to the Wisconsin Territory (where slavery was banned by the Missouri Compromise) before returning to Missouri in 1842. After Emerson's death in 1843, Scott sued for his freedom in Missouri courts in 1846 on the grounds that his prolonged residence in free territory had emancipated him. Lower courts ruled in his favor, but the Missouri Supreme Court in 1852 reversed that ruling. Scott then sued in federal court against Emerson's brother-in-law John Sanford (the case file misspelled it Sandford), arguing diversity of citizenship between Missouri and New York.

The Supreme Court took the appeal and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote the majority opinion in a 7 to 2 decision. The opinion made three holdings. First, no person of African descent, whether free or enslaved, could be a citizen of the United States, because the framers had not intended Black people to be included in the political community. Taney wrote that Black people had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order, with no rights which the white man was bound to respect. Therefore, Scott had no standing to sue in federal court.

Second, since the Court could have stopped at the standing question, the rest of the opinion was technically dicta. But Taney went further and held that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in any federal territory, since enslaved people were property and the Fifth Amendment prohibited deprivation of property without due process. The Missouri Compromise's 36 degrees 30 minutes line and similar territorial bans were therefore unconstitutional. Third, the Court held that Scott's earlier residence in free territory did not make him free under Missouri law.

Justices John McLean and Benjamin Curtis dissented vigorously. Curtis pointed out that free Black men had voted in five of the original states at ratification and were undeniably citizens at the founding. The decision did not calm the slavery crisis but inflamed it. Republicans denounced it as politically motivated and a Slave Power conspiracy. Abraham Lincoln campaigned against the decision in his Illinois Senate race in 1858. The Civil War made Dred Scott moot and the Fourteenth Amendment ratified July 9, 1868 explicitly overturned it.