Scott, Dred
NAME: Scott, Dred.
ACHIEVEMENTS: Possibly the worst legal decision in US history.
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
Scott v. Sanford (misspelled as “Sandford” in the original papers)
Mr. Scott’s actual first name seems to have been Samuel
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: circa 1799 in Virginia
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH:
Sept. 17, 1858/St. Louis, MO. Aged about 60
DISCIPLINE: Plaintiff
FIELD: Law
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: Unknown
SIBLINGS: Unknown
SPOUSE: Harriet Robinson, another slave, during the 1830s.
CHILDREN: Two daughters, Eliza and Lizzy.
EDUCATION: None.
MAJOR WORK: None
LIFE AND TIMES:
Dred Scott was, from birth, the property of the family of Peter Blow. In 1830 the Blow family moved to the vicinity of St. Louis, MO. During the 1830s the Blow family sold Scott to an Army surgeon, Dr. John Emerson. For the next 12 years, Scott lived in the Emerson household in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, in both of which places slavery was illegal.
In 1842, Dr. Emerson settled in St. Louis with his wife Irene Sanford. Dred Scott, with his wife and two daughters remained in the household and were inherited by Mrs. Emerson when Dr. Emerson died in 1843. To generate income Mrs. Emerson rented the Scott family to various business and individuals. Scott found the situation intolerable, and saved enough money from outside employment to attempt to buy freedom for himself and his family.
When Mrs. Emerson refused to accept Scott’s offer he brought suit in the St. Louis Circuit Court on April 6, 1846. The Scotts, penniless and illiterate, were supported through the case by their clergyman, anti slavery advocates, and (in an odd twist) by Scott’s original owners, the Blow family,.
Scott’s case was based on a simple premise: For nearly a decade, Scott had lived in states and territories in which slavery was illegal under the <judged under> Missouri Compromise*, which had forbidden slavery in that part of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30', except for Missouri. If slavery were illegal in those territories, Scott’s status as the property of Dr. Emerson was also illegal.
The St. Louis Court decided against Scott in 1847 but permitted him to appeal. In the second trial, in 1850, the jury ruled that the Scott family were free, based on their long residence in the state of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory. Mrs. Emerson appealed this decision to the Missouri Supreme Court, which ruled against the Scotts in 1852.
In 1853, Mrs. Emerson remarried and moved to Massachusetts, passing the Scott family to her brother John Sanford, and the case, as it moved into the Federal Court system, became known as Scott v. Sandford (sic). In 1854 the Federal Court ruled against Scott, and the case finally reached the Supreme Court in 1856.
In the case of Marbury v. Madison, in 1803, the Supreme Court had established itself as the final arbiter of the legality of federal legislation. This judiciary power went unused until the Dred Scott case.
Chief Justice Taney and all but two of the justices were southerners and strong pro-slavery advocates, and they made it clear that they intended to use the decision as an opportunity to crush anti-slavery activism once and for all.
The defendant claimed that Scott, as a slave, was not a citizen and therefore was not entitled to bring suit in the Federal Courts. In effect, in choosing to hear the case, the Court had already decided in Scott’s favor. The majority’s eagerness to protect the institution of slavery seems to have blinded them to this contradiction.
If, as the majority ruled, Scott could not, as a non-citizen, bring a suit to the Supreme Court, no further ruling was necessary or even permissible. Nonetheless, the majority went on to rule that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional; that the laws of individual states did not apply to the property of persons from other states, no matter how long they lived in their new residence; that the Constitution was written with the unstated intention permanently to bar persons of African descent from rights of citizenship; and that slavery was legal in all US states and territories, no matter what local laws might exist to the contrary.
While pro-slavery advocates had, and would again, use the concept of States Rights to defend the legality of slavery, the Scott decision essentially declared that states had no rights to establish any law regarding property. If the Scott decision is to be believed, one state could not, for example, tax any product (tobacco, whiskey etc.) if it were the property of an individual from a state without such a tax.
The sweeping language of the decision, its claim to express the “intention of the framers” of the Constitution, and its defiance of the right of legislatures to pass laws, set a precedent. Scott v. Sanford is invoked whenever Americans feel offended by a Supreme Court decision.
The decision, which scandalized most of the nation, guaranteed that the slavery issue would have no peaceful solution. The extension of slave-owner’s “property rights” to states where slavery was illegal put every free black American, and every escaped slave, at risk of being kidnapped by professional slave hunters. Escaped slaves had to reach Canada before they were beyond the reach of their owners.
The Scott v. Stanford decision remained in American law until the 13th Amendment of the Constitution was ratified in 1865, banning slavery once and for all.
In a last, sad twist, Irene Emerson had married an abolitionist politician, Calvin C. Chaffee. When John Sanford was committed to a mental institution in 1857, Mrs. Chaffee allowed ownership to revert to the Blow family, who promptly set the Scotts free. Dred Scott lived the last year of his life as a free man, working as a porter in a St. Louis hotel until he died of tuberculosis in September of 1858.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS; None
ONELINER: Dred Scott, US slave in famous case
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Hopkins, V. C., Dred Scott’s Case, New York: Fordham University Press, 1951
Kutler, S. I., ed., The Dred Scott Decision: Law or politics? Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967
Latham, F. B., The Dred Scott decision, March 6, 1857: slavery and the Supreme Court's self-inflicted wound, New York: F. Watts, 1968