The Dred Scott case helped bring the issue of slavery to the forefront of anti-slavery Northerners. It became a catalyst that hastened the final resolution of the issue through the Civil War.

In 1857, when the Dred Scott decision was rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court, the slaveholding states of the South and the free states of the North had reached an agreement on the issue of slavery by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which legislated a federal rule that slavery would be permitted only in states South of the thirty-sixth parallel. Most Northerners were generally satisfied that slavery would not expand into their own states, and were able to ignore what was going on in Southern states. However, this was also a time when new territories were applying for statehood; heated debates on the subject of whether slavery would be permitted in the new states were relatively commonplace.

Dred Scott was a slave who had been born in Virginia, lived in Missouri, and was sold to a Dr. John Emerson, an Army doctor, in the early 1830s. Because of his military career, Emerson was stationed in various areas of the country. The result was that Scott spent about seven years of his servitude at Fort Armstrong, Illinois and at Fort Snelling, in Wisconsin Territory, which were areas where slavery was not legal. Emerson died in 1843 and Scott remained the property of Mrs. Emerson.

In 1846 Scott, assisted by abolitionist lawyers, filed a declaration stating that Mrs. Emerson had "beat, bruised, and ill-treated" him before imprisoning him for twelve hours. The declaration also said that he was legally free because of his long residence in free states. The Missouri Supreme Court had previously freed a number of slaves based on similar arguments, but Mrs. Emerson won the first legal battle through a legal loophole. Scott's attorneys first closed the loophole, then Scott sued again. The case reached the Supreme Court of Missouri in 1850, but the political atmosphere in the Missouri judicial system had changed, and two of the three justices who would render the decision on Scott's lawsuit were pro-slavery. The court ruled against Scott in 1852 and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Scott's case was finally heard in 1857, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was a former Maryland slave owner, Roger B. Taney. President-elect James Buchanan contacted the Supreme Court prior to their decision to find out how their impending ruling would affect territorial issues. The Supreme Court ruled that Scott was not then, nor ever could be, a citizen of the United States, and therefore was ineligible to sue in federal court regarding any matter. The ruling said that because Scott was living in slavery in Missouri at the time the lawsuit was filed, his residency in Illinois and Wisconsin were irrelevant, and he was to remain a slave.

Taney's written decision also added that the Missouri Compromise was illegal because it deprived slaveholders of their property when they moved that property to non-slavery states. This opened the door to a notion repellent to anti-slavery Northerners and Republicans: the notion that legal barriers to slavery in their own states could be struck down by these types of rulings. The ruling took the nation a step backward in the struggle for the rights of African Americans, as Taney's argument ignored the fact that in five of the original thirteen colonies, free Black men had been accorded the right to vote and participate in government, the same as White citizens, since the Declaration of Independence had been signed and the Constitution written.

Many Republicans suspected that there had been a conspiracy between the judicial and executive branches of the government in this case. Abraham Lincoln and other prominent Republicans spoke out against it, and Taney was vilified for years afterwards.

The Dred Scott case put a fire under those who were determined not to see slavery expand into all the states of the Union. The case was not forgotten, and served as a source of heated debate right up until the Civil War broke out and the slavery issue was finally resolved. []

by Susan Robinson

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