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The North and the South had been divided for many years over the issue of slavery. The Southern economy was based largely upon cotton, which was grown on large farms called plantations. Enslaved African Americans did most of the work on the plantations. The Northern economy relied more on manufacturing and used paid workers.
Neither the North nor the South wanted the other’s ideas to spread to U.S. territories in the West. Northern states wanted to stop the spread of slavery. But Southern states believed that the U.S. government did not have the right to decide whether slavery should be allowed in a state or territory.
United States: extension of slaveryMaps show the compromises over the extension of slavery into the territories: the areas affected by the Missouri Compromise (top left), the Compromise of 1850 (top right), and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Several political compromises had averted civil war but failed to settle the slavery issue. For example, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Missouri admission as a slave state and Maine as a free state, with slavery prohibited from then on in territories north of Missouri’s southern border. Such compromises highlighted the sectional divisions over slavery.
Dred Scott, an enslaved African American, had resided in slave states (Virginia and Missouri) as well as in a free state (Illinois) and a free territory (the Wisconsin Territory). He ultimately sued for his freedom on the grounds that his residence on free soil had liberated him from the bonds of slavery.
Abolitionists aided Scott’s effort. Francis Murdoch, for example, helped launch the lawsuits of Scott and his wife, Harriet Scott.
Effects
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case struck down the Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional, maintaining that Congress had no power to forbid or abolish slavery in the territories.
The doctrine of popular sovereignty as articulated in the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)—whereby the people of each federal territory would have the power to decide whether the territory would enter the Union as a free or a slave state—was also invalidated by the ruling.
The opinion of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney further declared African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States.
The Supreme Court’s denial of Scott’s plea immediately became a violently divisive issue in national politics. It provoked outrage in the antislavery North. At the same time the ruling was celebrated in the South. “The Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery,” trumpeted one Georgia newspaper, “is now the supreme law of the land.” The Dred Scott decision thus increased tensions and pushed the country closer toward the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–65).
The decision also brought about the destruction of the reputation of Chief Justice Taney, who is remembered now almost solely for the blatantly proslavery decision he wrote and for his demeaning comments about African Americans. When Taney died in 1864, he was roundly denounced and vilified in the North, with Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts predicting that “the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history.”
Despite the ruling, many Northern courts and politicians rejected the Dred Scott decision as binding. 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.
After the American Civil War Congress, in 1865, passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution formally ending slavery in the United States.
