The decision

Decided 6 March 1857. Reported at 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393.

The three holdings that mattered

1. No standing. Scott could not sue in federal court, because people of African descent, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States within the meaning of the Constitution and so could not invoke diversity jurisdiction.
2. The Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in federal territories; doing so deprived slaveholders of property without due process under the Fifth Amendment.
3. Residence on free soil did not free him. His status on returning to Missouri was governed by Missouri law.

The reasoning, and its weakest joint

Taney's citizenship argument rested on a historical claim: that at the framing, people of African descent were regarded as "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect" and were not part of the political community that formed the Constitution.

That sentence is the one everyone quotes, and it is regularly quoted as though Taney were stating his own view rather than characterising the founders'. The distinction matters less than it sounds: he used the claim to decide the case, and the historical claim was contestable on its own terms. Free Black men voted in several states at ratification, a point Curtis made at length.

The dissents

Benjamin Curtis

The more damaging of the two. Curtis showed that in at least five states free Black men were citizens at the time the Constitution was adopted and had voted on its ratification — which, if true, dismantled the majority's central premise. He also argued that having found no jurisdiction, the Court had no business ruling on the Missouri Compromise at all.

Curtis resigned from the Court within months. The dispute over access to the opinions was the proximate cause; the decision itself was the real one.

John McLean

Argued that Scott's residence at Fort Snelling had freed him and that the Court's territorial holding was dictum. Less precise than Curtis and more political in tone.

Was the territorial holding necessary?

This is the oldest argument about the case and it is still live. If the Court lacked jurisdiction, the ruling on the Missouri Compromise was unnecessary to the judgment and therefore dictum. The majority reached it anyway, and contemporaries understood the reach as deliberate — an attempt to settle the territorial question by judicial fiat. Whether it can be defended as a holding is a question on which serious scholars still divide.