Reception and significance
- Formally:
- Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford
- Date:
- March 6, 1857
News •
“The Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery,” trumpeted one Georgia newspaper, “is now the supreme law of the land,” and opposition to it is “morally treason against the Government.” The view that Southern ideologues such as John C. Calhoun had promoted for more than a decade—that the federal government had a positive, indeed a constitutional, obligation to defend slavery—had apparently triumphed.
Not surprisingly, the North exploded in denunciations of Taney’s opinion. Several sober appraisals in the Northern press decimated the chief justice’s tortured legal reasoning. The Republican editor Horace Greeley published Justice Curtis’s dissent as a pamphlet to be used in the elections of 1858 and 1860. The press and pulpit echoed with attacks on the decision that were as heated as Southern defenses of it. Taney’s hopes of settling the issue lay smashed. If anything, Scott v. Sandford inflamed passions and brought the Union even closer to dissolving.
For all practical purposes, Northern courts and politicians rejected Scott v. Sandford as binding. In an advisory opinion, Maine’s high court declared that African Americans could vote in both state and federal elections. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that any slave coming into the state with his master’s consent, even as a sojourner, became free and could not be reenslaved upon returning to a slave state; the New York Court of Appeals handed down a similar ruling in Lemmon v. The People (1860). In several states, legislatures resolved to prohibit slavery in any form from crossing onto their soil and enacted legislation freeing slaves passing within their borders.
Taney is remembered now almost solely for the blatantly pro-slavery decision he wrote and for his demeaning comments about African Americans. When he died in 1864, he was roundly denounced and vilified in the North. Republican Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts predicted that “the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history.” Whatever else he may have done, his name will always be linked with that of a slave who wanted nothing more than his freedom.
Dred Scott did, in fact, get his freedom, but not through the courts. After he and his wife were later bought by the Blow family (who had sold Scott to Emerson in the first place), they were freed in 1857. Scott died of tuberculosis in St. Louis the following year. Harriet Scott lived until June 1876, long enough to see the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolish slavery in the United States.