Reading notes on Dred Scott v. Sandford
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In March 1857 the Supreme Court of the United States held that Dred Scott, a man born into slavery who had sued for his freedom, could not bring a case in federal court, because people of African descent were not and could not be citizens of the United States. The Court went further and held that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the federal territories.
It is commonly described as the worst decision the Court has ever issued. These pages set out what it actually said, why it was reasoned the way it was, and what happened next.
The pages
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| The decision | The holdings, the reasoning, and the dissents |
| Taney | The Chief Justice who wrote the majority opinion |
| Aftermath | Reaction, the road to war, and the amendments that overturned it |
| Sources | Where to read the opinion and the scholarship, most of it free |
| For teaching | Notes for anyone setting this in a classroom |
Who Dred Scott was
Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia around 1799. He was taken by his enslaver, an army surgeon, to Illinois, a free state, and then to Fort Snelling in what was then the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was barred under the Missouri Compromise. He returned to Missouri, and in 1846 he and his wife Harriet sued for their freedom on the grounds that residence on free soil had made them free.
That claim was not eccentric. Missouri courts had granted freedom on exactly those grounds for decades. The case ran for eleven years.
A note on how this is written
These are notes, not an argument. Where historians disagree, the disagreement is set out rather than settled. Where I hold a view, it is marked as mine. Every factual claim here should be traceable to something on the sources page; if one isn't, that's an error and I'd like to know about it.