Dred Scott Decision

a celebrated decision of the United States supreme court. The case occasioned intense excitement at the time. Briefly stated, the facts are as follows. Dred Scott was a negro born in Missouri about 1810. He was the slave of an army surgeon by the name of Dr. Emerson, who took him as a body servant with his regiment, first to Rock Island, Illinois, and in 1836 to Fort Snelling, then in the territory of Iowa, now in Minnesota. At Fort Snelling Dred married Harriet, a slave in the same family, and had two children. Rock Island and Fort Snelling were both in free territory. In 1838 the doctor returned to St. Louis, taking Dred with him. A lawyer, Francis P. Blair, an opponent of slavery, learned of the facts in Dred's case, and encouraged him to bring suit for assault and battery. It was not alleged that he had been subject to especially cruel treatment, only that he had been coerced. The argument of Dred's lawyer was that, by residence in free territory, Dred had become a free man and a citizen of the United States, entitled to the protection of its courts. The contention of the lawyer on the other side was that Dred was a mere chattel, like a horse, incapable of appearing in court, or of being represented by a lawyer. The case was taken from one court to another. A decision was handed down finally by the United States supreme court by a vote of seven to three, on March 6, 1857, giving judgment against Dred, thus deciding practically that an owner could take his slaves into any part of the United States and hold them. In the absence of congressional action to the contrary, this was actually the law of the United States until set aside by the thirteenth constitutional amendment in December 18, 1865. Dred, it may be said in passing, was purchased by friends and given his freedom.

Although the decision led to no colonizing of slaves on free soil, the feeling was intense. Quiet people on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line were set to thinking. The more rabid pro-slavery leaders were jubilant; the anti-slavery leaders were rendered desperate. If acquiesced in, this decision cut the ground completely from under the new Republican party, which had been organized to prevent the extension of slavery into free territory. If it meant to obey the supreme court decision, the Republican party had no excuse for continued being. Therefore, Lincoln declared that the decision must be changed by a change in the court. With even truer insight, James Russell Lowell wrote, "Have you seen the Dred Scott decision? I am glad. Now we shall see where the stouter lance-shafts are grown, North or South."

See Taney