RSS Feed
News
Doc of the Day: Dred Scott v. Sandford
03/06/10
Considered by many legal scholars to be the worst decision ever issued by the U.S. Supreme Court, Dred Scott v. Sandford was decided on March 6, 1857. Dred Scott was an African-American slave who sued for his freedom in a Missouri court in 1846. His legal argument centered on the fact that he had spent several years living with his master in Wisconsin and Illinois, where slavery was not allowed. By the time the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, it carried a great deal of political significance as the issue of slavery threatened to divide the nation.
Led by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Supreme Court adopted an extreme proslavery position that denied all rights of citizenship to blacks. The majority opinion described African Americans as “beings of an inferior order” who had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” It said that Dred Scott had no right to freedom, no right to sue in a court of law, and no right to equal protection under the law. The ruling also declared that the federal government did not have the authority to ban slavery in any state or territory. Taney intended for his ruling to resolve the dispute over slavery once and for all. Instead, it generated intense criticism and increased the sectional strife that led to the Civil War.
Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass anticipated a strong negative reaction to the Dred Scott decision in a May 1857 speech. “My hopes were never brighter than now,” he declared. “I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous issue of lies.” (We are unable to display the text of the document at this time. To view the text of Douglass’s speech, please visit this website: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=772.)
Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln expressed his opposition to the ruling during his election campaign, arguing that Dred Scott v. Sandford made a mockery of the nation’s founding principles. “I had thought the Declaration [of Independence] contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere; but no,” he declared in June 1857. “The Declaration is of no practical use now—mere rubbish—old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the victory is won.” (We are unable to display the text of the document at this time. To view the text of Lincoln’s speech, please visit this website: http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.2038:1.lincoln.)
Dred Scott v. Sandford was overturned following the Civil War with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which made anyone born in the United States a citizen, regardless of race.