Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

both cases, Emerson had paid little attention to the details of Illinois’s free-state statutes and transit laws, and even less to the Missouri Compromise (since Fort Snelling was located in a federal territory that had been part of the Louisiana Purchase). In 1840 Emerson was transferred again to Florida, and in 1842 he left the army and returned to St. Louis. The next year Emerson died, and in his will, Dred Scott and his wife and children passed into the hands of Emerson’s wife, Eliza Sanford Emerson.66

It was at this point that Dred Scott and his family made a bid for freedom, not by running away but by filing suit against Eliza Emerson on April 6, 1846, for wrongful imprisonment, on the grounds that their residence in a state and a territory that forbade slavery had made them free. This was not an unusual suit, and the St. Louis county circuit court that heard the case in 1850 ordered Dred Scott and his family freed. Eliza Emerson then appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, and on March 22, 1852, the Missouri high court truculently reversed the circuit ruling on the grounds that Scott was now a resident of Missouri, and Missouri was not necessarily bound to recognize the anti-slavery statutes of other states or territories.

In the meantime, Eliza Emerson remarried and moved to New York, and she transferred effective ownership of the Scotts to her brother, John Sanford, of St. Louis. Scott now filed a new suit, against Sanford, in the federal circuit court, arguing that his rights as a citizen had been violated: once on free territory, Scott claimed, he was a free man, a citizen entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizenship specified in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The Constitution was curiously vague on what actually constituted citizenship, but the federal circuit court eventually ruled against Scott in a jury trial in May 1854. Scott and his attorneys now appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which began hearing Scott v. Sanford in February 1856.67

The decision was handed down on March 6, 1857, two days after James Buchanan was inaugurated as the fifteenth president, and it rocked the country. First, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, writing for a seven-to-two majority, denied that Scott had the privilege of appealing to the Supreme Court, on the grounds that Scott was not only a slave but also of African descent. Taney argued that on both counts, Scott could not be legally considered a citizen of the United States.

The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? … It is absolutely certain that the African race were not included under the name of citizens of a State… and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.

The government did not choose to grant them much:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.68

This rendered all questions about transit laws and the Missouri Compromise moot, and reduced the only real question in Dred Scott to a matter of Scott’s race. Even if Scott’s master had violated free-state laws by taking Scott into free territory, Scott himself had no legal standing as a citizen before the federal courts, and the federal courts had no reason to listen to his suit, justified or not.

Taney’s argument from race caused only one part of the sensation; after all, Taney’s notions about Scott’s “inferior” race were not much different from what most white Americans and even many abolitionists believed (they merely differed as to whether that was sufficient reason to enslave someone). The political blockbuster of the Dred Scott decision came when Taney actually turned to consider Scott’s own plea, that residence in a free territory could terminate his slave status. Taney proceeded to deny this plea in the clearest and most chilling terms. No territorial government in any federally administered territory had the authority to alter the status of a white citizen’s property, much less to take that property out of a citizen’s hands, without due process of law or as a punishment for some crime.

This, of course, meant any property of any white citizen in any territory. In effect, Taney had resurrected John Calhoun’s “common property” doctrine and overturned any federal or territorial