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Dred Scott v. Sandford
5 articles on Dred Scott v. Sandford
Dred Scott Case
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1837 Includes: BibliographyThe Dred Scott case, referred to in case law as Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 Howard (60 U.S.) 393 (1857), was the most important slavery-related decision in U.S. Supreme Court history. Speaking for a 7–2 majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taneyreached three major conclusions that fundamentally shook national politics and deeply affected the rights of free blacks, especially in the North. Taney held that 1) blacks, even free blacks in the North, could never be considered citizens of the United States and could not sue in federal court as citizens of the states in which they lived; 2) the ban on slavery in the western territories that was part of the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because Congress had no power to regulate the territories beyond the most minimal organization of a territorial government; and 3) neither Congress nor the territorial governments could ever prohibit slaveholding in the western territories, and thus ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
1857 case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that U.S. territories could not prohibit slavery, and that neither free nor enslaved blacks had constitutional rights. Dred Scott, originally named Sam Blow, was born a slave in Virginia around 1795. His owner, Peter Blow, moved him first to Alabama in 1818, then to St. Louis, Missouri in 1830. After Blow died, his son sold Sam to John Emerson, a surgeon in the U.S. Army, who used him as a valet. In 1834, Emerson was transferred to Fort Armstrong, Illinois, where slavery was prohibited by the state constitution of 1818. Like many other slave-owning army officers, Emerson did not believe his postings in free states subjected him to antislavery laws, so he brought Sam with him.Two years later, Emerson was transferred to Fort Snelling, in what ...
Read full articleDred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)
Source: The Oxford Companion to American Law
Word Count: 925In 1850 a Missouri trial court declared Dred Scott to be free because his late owner, Dr. Emerson, had taken him to the free state of Illinois and later to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory (present-day Minnesota), where Congress had prohibited slavery under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. This decision was consistent with a long line of Missouri cases dating from 1824 that held that residence in a free jurisdiction led to the emancipation of a slave.The Missouri Supreme Court reversed this result in Scott v. Emerson (1852), rejecting its precedents because of the “dark and fell spirit” of abolitionism, which the court claimed had taken over the North. In 1854 Scott began a new suit in federal court against his new owner, John F. A. Sanford(his name is misspelled as Sandford in the ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 600(1857). In the 1830s, Dr. John Emerson took his slave, Dred Scott, to the free state of Illinois and then to Fort Snelling, in Wisconsin territory (now Minnesota), where the Missouri Compromise had prohibited slavery. In 1846, Scott sued Emerson's widow to gain his freedom. A Missouri court freed him in 1850, ruling that he had become free while living in Illinois and at Fort Snelling. This decision conformed to a long line of earlier cases in Missouri, other states, and England. In 1852 the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the lower court, and in 1854 Scott took his case to the federal courts, suing his new owner, John Sanford (the name is misspelled “Sandford” in the official report of the case), under the clause in Article 3, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitutionthat allows a citizen ofFederal ...
Read full articleDred Scott v. Sandford (1856)
Word Count: 30059A landmark among landmarks in the history of United States Supreme Court cases Dred Scott v. Sandfordinstantly became one of the most controversial, catastrophically consequential, and oft-reviled judicial rulings in the whole of American jurisprudence. In 1834 an enslaved man named Dred Scott was transported by his owner from Missouri to Illinois, a state whose constitution prohibited slavery. Scott's owner, John Emerson, however, was an officer in the United States Army and assumed (as was common) that state laws did not apply to him or to his slaves. Not long after, Scott was again removed to what was at the time part of the Wisconsin territory, and subsequently back to Missouri, where Emerson died unexpectedly of tuberculosis during the winter of 1843. Three years later, in April 1846, Scott sued Eliza Emerson, John Emerson's widow and Scott's then-owner, for his freedom. Scott claimed that his time in Illinois ...
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