Dred Scott Decision Key Facts

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About 1799 Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia. In the early 1830s he was sold by the Peter Blow family to John Emerson of Missouri.

In 1833 Emerson began a series of moves as part of his service in the U.S. military. He took Scott from Missouri (a slave state) to Illinois (a free state) and finally into the Wisconsin Territory (a free territory, under the provisions of the Missouri Compromise of 1820).

During this period Scott met and married Harriet Robinson. In the early 1840s the Emersons (Emerson had married in 1838) and the Scotts returned to Missouri. Emerson died in 1843.

Scott reportedly attempted to purchase his freedom from Emerson’s widow, who refused . In 1846, with the help of antislavery lawyers, Harriet and Dred filed individual lawsuits for their freedom in Missouri on the grounds that their residence in a free state and a free territory had freed them from the bonds of slavery. It was later agreed that only Dred’s case would move forward; the decision in that case would apply to Harriet’s case as well.

Although the case was long thought to have been unusual, historians later demonstrated that several hundred suits for freedom were filed by or on behalf of enslaved persons in the decades before the American Civil War.

The case dragged on for years and eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court announced its decision in March 1857, just two days after the inauguration of President James Buchanan.

Dred Scott decisionNewspaper notice for a pamphlet on the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-132561)

A majority of the Supreme Court (seven out of nine justices), through the opinion of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that Scott was still a slave and not entitled to rights as a U.S. citizen and so had no constitutional right to sue in a federal court. Taney’s opinion, in fact, declared that Scott had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The decision further held that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the U.S. territories and that the Missouri Compromise therefore was unconstitutional.

Two justices, John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts, wrote devastating critiques of Taney’s opinion. Curtis undercut most of the historical arguments that Taney had used. He showed that African Americans had voted in a number of states at the country’s founding. Thus, Curtis argued, they could not now be denied the right to claim citizenship.

The decision horrified many people in the North. Abolitionists there continued their agitation against slavery. By convincing many Northerners that the South was determined to preserve and extend slavery, the Dred Scott decision served to widen the gap between Northern and Southern states.

Scott did get his freedom, but not through the courts. Soon after the Supreme Court handed down its decision, members of the Blow family (who had sold Scott to Emerson in the first place) purchased both Dred and Harriet and freed them later in 1857. Scott died of tuberculosis in St. Louis, Missouri, the following year. Harriet Scott lived until 1876.

Northern courts rejected the Dred Scott decision as binding. In 1860, for example, the New York Court of Appeals declared that any enslaved person who set foot in New York state was free and could never be re-enslaved. Several other states passed laws declaring that slavery was illegal within their boundaries.

Thirteenth AmendmentThe Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the Constitution of the United States formally abolished slavery.
NARA

Proslavery and antislavery forces continued to conflict. The American Civil War erupted in 1861. After the war ended in 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment. The amendment formally ended slavery in the United States, though African Americans continued to face discrimination.

Dred Scott Decision Timeline

Dred Scott Decision | Timeline

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