Dred Scott Case

Background

Dred Scott was a Missouri slave who had accompanied his master, Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon, to Illinois in 1834 and to Wisconsin Territory, present-day Minnesota, in 1836. Because both areas were free of slavery according to the Missouri Compromise, Dred Scott claimed to have been automatically freed by his presence there. Scott and Emerson returned to Missouri in 1838. In 1850, after Dr. Emerson's death, a court in St. Louis, Missouri, agreed with Scott's view, citing Missouri precedents dating from 1824, that Dred Scott had become free while living in non-slave jurisdictions and remained free, despite his return to Missouri. However, Scott's plea was lost on appeal in the Missouri Supreme Court. Reflecting the proslavery ideology of the South, the Missouri Supreme Court disavowed the old precedents in Scott v. Emerson (1852) and ruled that Dred Scott was not a citizen and could not sue for his freedom from Emerson's widow. After remarrying, the widow subsequently passed ownership of Dred Scott and his wife and two daughters through friends to her brother, John F. A. Sanford (incorrectly spelled in the case as Sandford), a native-born Southerner residing in New York.

By arranging the sale of the slave Dred Scott and his family to a New Yorker, Mr. Sanford, Dred Scott's friends hoped to argue the case in the federal courts on the grounds that it had become a case of a citizen of Missouri suing a citizen of New York. In 1854, Scott sued in the U.S. District

Court in Missouri, arguing that as a “citizen” of Missouri, he was entitled to sue a citizen of another state in federal court, because Article III of the Constitution gave the federal courts jurisdiction over cases “between citizens of different states.” The hope of Dred Scott and his supporters was to carry the case to the Supreme Court, where the entire question of slavery in the territories might be decided. Therefore, the essence of the case centered on the power of Congress to exclude slavery from the territories belonging to the nation. The Republican contention that Congress had always possessed this power, and exercised it in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, was at issue. Southerners were confident that the Court would uphold Douglas's 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act repeal of the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery and deny the power of Congress to exclude slavery from the territories. (Both slave owners and abolitionists sent “settlers” into Kansas to intimidate the voters in such cases as the 1855 sacking of Lawrence by a posse of proslavery “Border Ruffians” and the immediate retaliation by abolitionist John Brown, whose group of seven men, including four sons and his son-in-law, shot to death one slave owner and hacked four others to death in the so-called Pottawatomie Massacre. Therefore, “Bleeding Kansas” became the catch-phrase in the 1850s over the issue of popular sovereignty, whereby the residents of the given territory themselves would vote on slavery or “free soil.”) Seven of the nine justices were Democrats, in the days when the Democratic Party had strong contingencies of proslavery advocates, five of whom were from the South. Moreover, there were indications that a majority of the Court was eager to remove the entire subject of slavery from Congress.

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