Dred Scott: The Cause

     Following background is from ushistory.org:
 From the 1780s, the question of whether slavery would be permitted in new territories had threatened the Union. Over the decades, many compromises had been made to avoid disunion. But what did the Constitution say on this subject? This question was raised in 1857 before the Supreme Court in case of Dred Scott vs. Sandford. Dred Scott was a slave of an army surgeon, John Emerson. Scott had been taken from Missouri to posts in Illinois and what is now Minnesota for several years in the 1830s, before returning to Missouri. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had declared the area including Minnesota free.In 1846, Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived in a free state and a free territory for a prolonged period of time. Finally, after eleven years, his case reached the Supreme Court. At stake were answers to critical questions, including slavery in the territories and citizenship of African-Americans. The verdict was a bombshell. The rest is explained here.

     Even though it was not the only spark to the civil war, Dred Scott vs. Sandford certainly got the fire going at a faster pace. The tension it caused, caused a variety of reactions from a variety of people. Whether it was the power of the government or the potential spread of slavery in the west and eventually the north, the Dred Scott case was a party starter.

     The Dred Scott decision served as an eye-opener to Northerners who believed that slavery was tolerable as long as it stayed in the South. According to a source, "If the decision took away any power Congress once had to regulate slavery in new territories, these once-skeptics reasoned, slavery could quickly expand into much of the western United States. And once slavery expanded into the territories, it could spread quickly into the once-free states. The fact that congress was limiting their power hurt for the argument against slavery. Four years after Chief Justice Taney read his infamous Scott v. Sandford decision, parts of the proslavery half of the Union had seceded and the nation was engaged in civil war. Because of the passions it aroused on both sides, Taney's decision certainly accelerated the start of this conflict." Even in 1865, as the long and bloody war drew to a close with the Northern, antislavery side on top, a mere mention of the decision struck a nerve in the Northern Congress. A simple and customary request for a commemorative bust of Taney, to be placed in a hall with busts of all former Supreme Court Chief Justices, was blocked by the Republican-controlled Congress. Charles Sumner, the leader of those who blocked the request, had strong words on the late Chief Justice and his most notorious decision:

"I speak what cannot be denied when I declare that the opinion of the Chief Justice in the case of Dred Scott was more thoroughly abominable than anything of the kind in the history of courts. Judicial baseness reached its lowest point on that occasion. You have not forgotten that terrible decision where a most unrighteous judgment was sustained by a falsification of history. Of course, the Constitution of the United States and every principle of Liberty was falsified, but historical truth was falsified also..."

      The north refused to accept a decision by a Court they felt was dominated by "Southern fire-eaters." Many Northerners, including Abraham Lincoln, felt that the next step would be for the Supreme Court to decide that no state could exclude slavery under the Constitution, regardless of their wishes or their laws. It is apparent that the antislavery movement did not see this case as significant, assuming that the Court would rule on narrow grounds that Scott was still a slave. The idea that the Court would weigh in on questions relating to the power of Congress, the rights of states, the rights of individuals, and the rights of property owners, all questions which lead back to the Constitution, seem obvious today, but few foresaw that such action was imminent, at least not with this case. The north often argued that the decision made by the Supreme Court was the "Opinion of the Court" which sprung off the fact that the Chief Justice of the United States was Roger B. Taney, a former slave owner, as were four other southern justices on the Court. The two dissenting justices of the nine-member Court were the only Republicans.

Robert B. Taney, Chief Justice

     Southerners, primarily white, rejoiced at the decision, because it meant that slavery was legal in all of the territories. This was just what they had always wanted. The African Americans were angry that such an injustice had taken place by the government. The South really wanted their slaves to work their land, and they didn't want slavery to be abolished. They felt they had more power, now that they had beat the North in such a big debate. Southerners were ecstatic that they had increased their influence throughout the United States. Due to the declaration that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, the balance of slave and free states was upset in the South's favor. The South enjoyed a strong hold on the power of the government, and this decision verified that the South was still primarily in power.

The trials of Dred Scott were very contradicting in that all three courts gave different reasoning for their choice. According to a source, "  The Dred Scott case was first brought to trial in 1847 in the first floor, west wing courtroom of St. Louis' Old Courthouse. The Scotts lost their first trial because of hearsay evidence, but were granted a second in 1850. In the second trial, a jury heard the evidence and decided that Dred Scott and his family should be free.Slaves were valuable property, and Mrs. Emerson did not want to lose the Scotts, so she appealed her case to the Missouri State Supreme Court, which in 1852 reversed the ruling made at the Old Courthouse, stating that "times now are not as they were when the previous decisions on this subject were made." The slavery issue was becoming more divisive nationwide, and provided the court with political reasons to return Dred Scott to slavery. The court was saying that Missouri law allowed slavery, and it would uphold the rights of slave-owners in the state at all costs."

     The Dred Scott case exacerbated sectional tensions between the north and south. It pushed them more away than together than it intended. He effect a that the verdict caused were such like the fact that voters could not vote to ban slavery because slaves were property. Along with the point that congress can't control slavery because they are property which is protected by an amendment and can only do so through due process. The tension that the verdict caused ultimately led to the rise of the Republican Party which led to the secession of the southern states which then led to the great civil war.

     Clearly Scott v. Sandford was not an easily forgotten case. That it still raised such strong emotions well into the Civil War shows that it helped bring on the war by hardening the positions of each side to the point where both were willing to fight over the issue of slavery. The North realized that if it did not act swiftly, the Southern states might take the precedent of the Scott case as a justification for expanding slavery into new territories and free states alike. The South recognized the threat of the Republican party and knew that the party had gained a considerable amount of support as a result of the Northern paranoia in the aftermath of the decision. In the years following the case, Americans realized that these two mindsets, both quick to defend their side, both distrustful of the other side, could not coexist in the same nation. The country realized that, as Abraham Lincoln stated, "`A house divided against itself cannot stand.' . . . This government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." [34] Scott's case left America in "shocks and throes and convulsions" that only the complete eradication of slavery through war could cure.