Sources
Nearly everything primary here is out of copyright and free. The scholarship is not, but most of it is in any university library.
Primary
| Source | Note |
|---|---|
| Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857) | The full report, including both dissents. Free at the Library of Congress and in the standard case databases |
| The case file, Missouri State Archives | Digitised. The 1846 petition is worth reading on its own |
| Lincoln–Douglas debates, 1858 | Full transcripts widely available; the Freeport exchange is the key one |
| Contemporary newspapers | Chronicling America at the Library of Congress. Search the weeks after 6 March 1857 to see the split reaction |
Scholarship
- Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (1978). Still the standard work, and the one to read if you read only one. Pulitzer Prize, 1979.
- Mark A. Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (2006). Argues the decision was more defensible on the law of its time than the consensus allows. Useful precisely because it cuts against the grain.
- Austin Allen, Origins of the Dred Scott Case (2006). Places the decision in the Taney Court's wider jurisprudence rather than treating it as a one-off.
- Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott (2009). Recovers Harriet Scott, who is missing from most accounts, including the ones that should know better.
What to be careful with
Popular summaries frequently misstate the holding — usually by describing it as ruling that enslaved people were property and stopping there, which misses the citizenship holding that did the real work. Encyclopaedia entries vary widely in quality. If a source gives no citation to the report itself, treat its characterisation of what the Court said with caution.
On this site
These pages are notes, not scholarship. They're written from the works above and from the report. Where I've simplified, I've tried to say so. Where I've got something wrong, please see the corrections page.