Dred Scott v. Sandford

The Missouri Compromise created the slave-holding state Missouri (Mo., yellow) but prohibited slavery in the rest of the former Louisiana Territory (here, marked Missouri Territory 1812) above the 36°30' North parallel (green).

In the late 1810s, a major political dispute arose over the creation of new American states from the vast territory the United States had acquired from France in 1803 through the Louisiana Purchase.[9] The dispute centered on whether the new states would be "free" states like the existing Northern states, in which slavery would be illegal, or whether they would be "slave" states like the existing Southern states, in which slavery would be legal.[9] The Southern states wanted the new states to be slave states in order to enhance their own political and economic power, but the Northern states opposed this for their own political and economic reasons, as well as their moral concerns over allowing the institution of slavery to expand.

In 1820, the U.S. Congress passed an agreement known as the "Missouri Compromise" that was intended to resolve the dispute. The Compromise first admitted Maine into the Union as a free state, then created Missouri out of a portion of the Louisiana Purchase territory and admitted it as a slave state, but at the same time prohibited slavery in the area north of the Parallel 36°30′ north, where most of the territory lay.[9] The legal effects of a slaveowner taking his slaves from Missouri into the free territory north of the 36°30′ north parallel, as well as the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise itself, eventually came to a head in the Dred Scott case.

Dred Scott

Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia in around 1799.[10] Little is known of his early years.[11] His owner, Peter Blow, moved to Alabama in 1818, taking his six slaves along to work a farm near Huntsville. In 1830, Blow gave up farming and settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he sold Scott to U.S. Army surgeon Dr. John Emerson.[12] After purchasing Scott, Emerson took him to Fort Armstrong in Illinois. A free state, Illinois had been free as a territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and had prohibited slavery in its constitution in 1819 when it was admitted as a state.

In 1836, Emerson moved with Scott from Illinois to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin territory in what has become the state of Minnesota. Slavery in the Wisconsin Territory (some of which, including Fort Snelling, was part of the Louisiana Purchase) was prohibited by the United States Congress under the Missouri Compromise. During his stay at Fort Snelling, Scott married Harriet Robinson in a civil ceremony by Harriet's owner, Major Lawrence Taliaferro, a justice of the peace who was also an Indian agent. The ceremony would have been unnecessary had Dred Scott been a slave, as slave marriages had no recognition in the law.[13][12]

In 1837, the army ordered Emerson to Jefferson Barracks Military Post, south of St. Louis, Missouri. Emerson left Scott and his wife at Fort Snelling, where he leased their services out for profit. By hiring Scott out in a free state, Emerson was effectively bringing the institution of slavery into a free state, which was a direct violation of the Missouri Compromise, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Wisconsin Enabling Act.[13]

Before the end of the year, the army reassigned Emerson to Fort Jesup in Louisiana, where Emerson married Eliza Irene Sanford in February, 1838. Emerson sent for Scott and Harriet, who proceeded to Louisiana to serve their master and his wife. While en route to Louisiana, Scott's daughter Eliza was born on a steamboat underway on the Mississippi River between Illinois and what would become Iowa. Because Eliza was born in free territory, she was technically born as a free person under both federal and state laws. Upon entering Louisiana, the Scotts could have sued for their freedom, but did not. One scholar suggests that, in all likelihood, the Scotts would have been granted their freedom by a Louisiana court, as it had respected laws of free states that slaveholders forfeited their right to slaves if they brought them in for extended periods. This had been the holding in Louisiana state courts for more than 20 years.[13]

Toward the end of 1838, the army reassigned Emerson to Fort Snelling. By 1840, Emerson's wife Irene returned to St. Louis with their slaves, while Dr. Emerson served in the Seminole War. While in St. Louis, she hired them out. In 1842, Emerson left the army. After he died in the Iowa Territory in 1843, his widow Irene inherited his estate, including the Scotts. For three years after John Emerson's death, she continued to lease out the Scotts as hired slaves. In 1846, Scott attempted to purchase his and his family's freedom, but Irene Emerson refused, prompting Scott to resort to legal recourse.[14]

Having been unsuccessful in his attempt to purchase freedom for his family and himself, Scott, with the help of abolitionist legal advisers, sued Emerson for his freedom in a Missouri court in 1846. Scott received financial assistance for his case from the family of his previous owner, Peter Blow.[13] Blow's daughter Charlotte was married to Joseph Charless, an officer at the Bank of Missouri. Charless signed the legal documents as security for Dred Scott and secured the services of the bank's attorney, Samuel Mansfield Bay, for the trial.[12]

Scott based his legal argument on precedents such as Somersett v. Stewart, Winny v. Whitesides,[15] and Rachel v. Walker,[16] claiming his presence and residence in free territories required his emancipation. Scott's lawyers argued the same for Scott's wife and claimed that Eliza Scott's birth on a steamboat between a free state and a free territory had made her free upon birth.

It was expected that the Scotts would win their freedom with relative ease since Missouri courts had heard more than ten other cases in which they had freed slaves who had been taken into free territory.[13] Furthermore, the case had been assigned to Judge Alexander Hamilton, who was known to be sympathetic to slave freedom suits.[12] Scott was represented by three lawyers during the course of the case because it was over a year from the time of the original petition filing to the trial. His first lawyer was Francis B. Murdoch, who was replaced by Charles D. Drake. When Drake left St. Louis in 1847, Samuel M. Bay took over as Scott's lawyer.[17] In June 1847, Scott lost his case by a technicality since he had not proven that he was actually enslaved by Irene Emerson. At the trial, the grocer Samuel Russell had testified that he was leasing Scott from Irene Emerson, but on cross-examination, he admitted that the leasing arrangements had actually been made by his wife, Adeline. Thus, Russell's testimony was ruled hearsay, and the jury returned a verdict for Emerson.[12]

In December 1847, Judge Hamilton granted Scott a new trial. Emerson appealed this decision to the Supreme Court of Missouri, which affirmed the trial court's order in 1848. A major fire, a cholera epidemic, and two continuances delayed the new trial until January 1850. While the case awaited trial, Scott and his family were placed in the custody of the St. Louis County Sheriff, who continued to lease out the services of Scott and his family. The proceeds were placed in escrow, to be paid to Scott's owner or to himself upon resolution of the case.

In the 1850 trial, Scott was represented by Alexander P. Field and David N. Hall, both of whom had previously shared offices with Charles Edmund LaBeaume, the brother of Peter Blow's daughter-in-law. The hearsay problem was surmounted by a deposition from Adeline Russell that stated that she had leased the Scotts from Emerson. The jury found in favor of Scott and his family. Unwilling to accept the loss of four slaves and a substantial escrow account, Emerson appealed to the Supreme Court of Missouri, but she had moved to Massachusetts and transferred ownership of Scott to her brother, John F. A. Sanford.

In November 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the trial court's decision and held that the Scotts were still legally slaves and that they should have sued for freedom while they lived in a free state. Chief Justice William Scott declared:

Times are not now as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made. Since then not only individuals but States have been possessed with a dark and fell spirit in relation to slavery, whose gratification is sought in the pursuit of measures, whose inevitable consequences must be the overthrow and destruction of our government. Under such circumstances it does not behoove the State of Missouri to show the least countenance to any measure which might gratify this spirit. She is willing to assume her full responsibility for the existence of slavery within her limits, nor does she seek to share or divide it with others.[18]

The case looked hopeless, and the Blow family decided that it could no longer pay for Scott's legal costs. Scott also lost both of his lawyers, as Alexander Field had moved to Louisiana and David Hall had died. The case was now undertaken pro bono by Roswell Field, whose office employed Dred Scott as a janitor. Field also discussed the case with LaBeaume, who had taken over the lease on the Scotts in 1851.[19] After the Missouri Supreme Court decision, Judge Hamilton turned down a request by Emerson's lawyers to release the rent payments from escrow and to deliver the slaves into their owner's custody.[12]

In 1853, Dred Scott again sued his current owner, John Sanford,[1] but this time in federal court. Sanford had returned to New York and so the federal courts now had diversity jurisdiction under Article III, Section 2 of the US Constitution. In addition to the existing complaints, Scott also alleged that Sanford had assaulted his family and held them captive for six hours on January 1, 1853.[20]

At trial in 1854, Judge Robert William Wells directed the jury to rely on Missouri law to settle the question of Scott's freedom. Since the Missouri Supreme Court had held that Scott remained a slave, the jury found in favor of Sanford. Scott then appealed to the US Supreme Court, where the case was recorded as Dred Scott v. Sandford and entered history with that title. Scott was represented before the Supreme Court by Montgomery Blair and George Ticknor Curtis, whose brother Benjamin was a Supreme Court Justice. Sanford was represented by Reverdy Johnson and Henry S. Geyer.[12]

When the case was filed, the two sides agreed on a statement of facts that claimed Scott had been sold by Dr. Emerson to John Sanford. However, that was a legal fiction. Dr. Emerson had died in 1843, and Dred Scott had filed his 1847 suit against Irene Emerson. There is no record of Dred Scott's transfer to Sanford or of his transfer back to Irene Chaffee. John Sanford died shortly before Scott's manumission, but Scott was not listed in the probate records of Sanford's estate.[19] Also, Sanford was not acting as Dr. Emerson's executor, as he was never appointed by a probate court, and the Emerson estate had already been settled when the federal case was filed.[13]

Because of the murky circumstances surrounding ownership, the parties to Dred Scott v. Sandford have been suggested to have contrived to create a test case.[14][19][20] Mrs. Emerson's remarriage to an abolitionist US Representative seemed suspicious to contemporaries, and Sanford seemed to be a front and to have allowed himself to be sued, despite not actually being Scott's owner. However, Sanford had been involved in the case since 1847, before his sister married Chaffee. He had secured counsel for his sister in the state case, and he engaged the same lawyer for his own defense in the federal case.[14] Sanford also consented to be represented by genuine pro-slavery advocates before the Supreme Court, rather than to put up a token defense.

Historians discovered that after the Supreme Court had heard arguments in the case but before it had issued a ruling, President-elect James Buchanan wrote to his friend, US Supreme Court Associate Justice John Catron, to ask whether the case would be decided by the Supreme Court before his inauguration in March 1857.[21] Buchanan hoped that the decision would quell unrest in the country over the slavery issue by issuing a ruling that put the future of slavery beyond the realm of political debate.

Buchanan later successfully pressured Associate Justice Robert Cooper Grier, a Northerner, to join the Southern majority in Dred Scott to prevent the appearance that the decision was made along sectional lines.[22] By today's standards and even by the time's more lenient standards, Buchanan's applying of such political pressure to a member of a sitting court would be regarded as highly improper.[23] Republicans fueled speculation as to Buchanan's influence by publicizing that Taney had secretly informed Buchanan of the decision. Buchanan declared in his inaugural address that the slavery question would "be speedily and finally settled" by the Supreme Court.[24][13]

Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of the majority opinion in the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision

Seven justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney began with what he saw as the core issue in the case: whether or not black people could possess federal U.S. citizenship under the Constitution.[9]

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 of the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied [sic] by that instrument to the citizen?

— Dred Scott, 60 U.S. at 403.

In answer, the Court ruled that they could not. It held that black people could not be American citizens, and therefore a lawsuit to which they were a party could never qualify for the "diversity of citizenship" that Article III of the United States Constitution requires for American federal courts to be able to exercise jurisdiction over cases that do not involve federal questions.[9] Taney based this holding on a set of historical notions and assertions, and provided little legal reasoning for the Court's conclusions. His primary rationale was his claim that black African slaves and their descendants were never intended to be part of the American social and political landscape.[9]

We think ... that [black people] 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. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America's founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.

— Dred Scott, 60 U.S. at 404–05.[26]

Taney then spent many pages reviewing laws from various U.S. states that involved the status of black Americans at the time of the Constitution's drafting in 1787.[9] He concluded that these laws showed that a "perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery."[27] Thus, he concluded, black people were not American citizens, and could not sue as citizens in federal courts.[9] This meant that U.S. states lacked the power to alter the legal status of black people by granting them state citizenship.[25]

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. ... They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order ... and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.

— Dred Scott, 60 U.S. at 407.

This holding normally would have ended the decision, since it disposed of Dred Scott's case. But Taney did not conclude the matter before the Court, as per usual procedure.[9] Taney continued on to assess the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise itself. He wrote that the Compromise's legal provisions would free slaves who were living north of the 36°N latitude line in the western territories. However, in the Court's judgment, this would constitute the government depriving slaveowners of their property—since slaves were legally the property of their owners—without due process of law, which is forbidden under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[28] Taney also reasoned that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights implicitly precluded any possibility of constitutional rights for black African slaves and their descendants.[25] Thus, Taney concluded:

Now, ... the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. ... 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 [36°N 36' latitude] line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void.

— Dred Scott, 60 U.S. at 451–52.

Taney held that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, marking the first time since the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme Court had struck down a federal law. Because the Compromise exceeded the scope of Congress's powers and was unconstitutional, Taney wrote, Dred Scott was still a slave regardless of his time spent in the parts of the Northwest Territory that were north of 36°N and did not allow slavery.[29] Therefore, he was still a slave under Missouri law, and the Court had to follow Missouri law in the matter. For all these reasons, the Court concluded, Dred Scott could not bring suit in U.S. federal court.[29]

Justices Benjamin Robbins Curtis (left) and John McLean (right), the only two justices who dissented in Dred Scott.

Justices Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean were the only two dissenters from the Court's decision, and both wrote dissenting opinions. Curtis authored a 67-page dissent describing the historical and legal baselessness of Taney's arguments that black people could not possess federal U.S. citizenship.[25] At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, black men could vote in five of the thirteen states. That made them citizens of their states and also of the United States.[30] Curtis cited numerous state statutes and state court decisions supporting his position, such as Marie Louise v. Marot, an 1835 case in which the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that for an enslaved Louisianan woman, "being free for one moment in France, it was not in the power of her former owner to reduce her again to slavery."[31] Curtis's dissent was extremely persuasive, and prompted Taney to add 18 additional pages to his majority opinion over a period of several weeks in an attempt to rebut some of Curtis's arguments.[32]

McLean's dissent deemed the argument that black people could not be citizens "more a matter of taste than of law." He attacked much of the Supreme Court's decision as obiter dicta that was not legally authoritative on the ground that once the court determined that it did not have jurisdiction to hear Scott's case, it should have simply dismissed the action, rather than passing judgment on the merits of the claims. The dissenting opinions by Curtis and McLean also attacked the Court's overturning of the Missouri Compromise on its merits. They noted that it was not necessary to decide the question and that none of the authors of the Constitution had ever objected on constitutional grounds to the Congress's adoption of the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Continental Congress or the subsequent acts that barred slavery north of 36°30' N.

The economist Charles Calomiris and the historian Larry Schweikart discovered that uncertainty about whether the entire West would suddenly become slave territory or engulfed in combat like "Bleeding Kansas" gripped the markets immediately. The east–west railroads collapsed immediately (although north–south lines were unaffected), causing, in turn, the near-collapse of several large banks and the runs that ensued. What followed the runs has been called the Panic of 1857.

The effects of the Panic of 1857, unlike the Panic of 1837, were almost exclusively confined to the North, a fact that Calomiris and Schweikart attribute to the South's system of branch banking, as opposed to the North's system of unit banking. In the South's branch banking system information moved reliably among the branch banks and transmission of the panic was minor. Northern unit banks, in contrast, were competitors and seldom shared such vital information.[38]

The decision was hailed in southern slaveholding society as a proper interpretation of the US Constitution. According to Jefferson Davis, then a US Senator from Mississippi who later became the President of the Confederate States, the Dred Scott case was merely a question of "whether Cuffee should be kept in his normal condition or not."[39] ("Cuffee" was a common slave name and was also used to refer to a black person, since slavery was a racial caste.)[40]

Before Dred Scott, Democratic Party politicians had sought repeal of the Missouri Compromise and were finally successful in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. It allowed each newly-admitted state south of the 40th parallel to vote as to whether to be a slave state or free state. With Dred Scott, Taney's Supreme Court permitted the unhindered expansion of slavery into all the territories.

Thus, Dred Scott decision represented a culmination of what many at that time considered a push to expand slavery. Southerners, who had grown uncomfortable with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, argued that they had a constitutional right to bring slaves into the territories, regardless of any decision by a territorial legislature on the subject. The Dred Scott decision seemed to endorse that view. The expansion of slavery into the territories and resulting admission of new states would mean a loss of northern political power, as many of the new states would be admitted as slave states. Counting three fifths of the slave population for apportionment would add to the slaveholding states' political representation in Congress.

Although Taney believed that the decision represented a compromise that would be a final settlement of the slavery question by transforming a contested political issue into a matter of settled law, the decision produced the opposite result. It strengthened Northern opposition to slavery, divided the Democratic Party on sectional lines, encouraged secessionist elements among Southern supporters of slavery to make bolder demands, and strengthened the Republican Party.