In the late 1840s a slave named Dred Scott who had been passed from a former owner to relatives upon the owner's death, was beaten by his new master. Scott tried to have the man arrested for assault, on the grounds that he (Scott) was no longer a slave since he had lived in free territory. The case became famous—for some infamous—and the Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott was still a slave and that African Americans (whether slave or free) had no rights as citizens under the Constitution.
It is the opinion of this historian that while the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford is offensive to our sensibilities, the real problem lay in the Constitution. What the court said was that a document which purported to extend civil rights to citizens, but which at the same time acknowledged the enslavement of a segment of the population, could not possibly have intended for those rights to be extended to those who were enslaved. It can be argued that when you protect slavery in the Constitution, you are just asking for trouble down the road, as George Mason and others predicted at the time. Since Dred Scott was not a citizen, he could not sue, and there was no case before the court. The Court would have done well to shut up at that point, but it went further, declaring that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional and denying that Congress had any power to prohibit slavery in the territories. In fact, however, the Court helped clarify the issue by pointing out, (as Lincoln said a year later) that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Dred Scott highlighted the difficulty of allowing slavery and freedom to co-exist under the same Constitution.
The Dred Scott Case posed three questions:
• Was Scott free by virtue having lived in free areas? (Answer: No)
• Was Scott a citizen who could sue in Federal courts? (Answer: No)
• Was the Missouri Compromise constitutional? (Answer: No!)
The decision was clearly a Southern victory; Northern abolitionists charged that there was a "slave power conspiracy," and rekindled their efforts to oppose slavery. The case clearly made things worse, but again, only hastened a crisis that was bound to blow up anyway.
The Republican fallback position was that since the Court said that Scott was not a citizen, no case had legally been before the court. Therefore, all but that part of the decision was irrelevant and had no force; thus the case accomplished nothing.
In fact, what the Court really said was that since a person could not be deprived of property without due process of law, and crossing a state boundary did not constitute due process by any means, that a slave owner could take his slaves anywhere in the country without fear of losing them. For all practical purposes, then, the decision made slavery legal everywhere.
World History
