- [Instructor] In this video,
I want to give you a very brief overview
of Dred Scott versus Sandford,
a Supreme Court decision made in 1857
that had major consequences on the definition
of citizenship in the United States.
This case was tied up with so many
of the questions and problems
that plagued America at this time, particularly slavery
and the westward expansion of the nation,
that it's really easy to go far down
into the rabbit hole on this one.
But I'm gonna try to restrain myself
and just give you the basics you need to know
to understand what happened in the case
and why it's important.
If you do wanna learn more about the Dred Scott case,
we have a much more in-depth video on the subject
that I'll link to in the description.
Okay, so let me set the scene for you.
In the mid-1800s, the U.S. government had been trying to
balance the desires and the political power
of the slave-owning southern states
and the free northern states for decades.
They kept making compromises to keep the union
from falling apart.
And one of these was the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
The geography of this is important.
So let's take a look at a map of North America at the time.
So here, you can see the free states and territories
of the north in green, and the slave-owning states
and territories in blue.
In 1820, the U.S. government agreed that to maintain
the balance of power between slave and free states,
as new states entered the union from western lands,
new states below this 36 30' line of latitude
would be slave states, and above it would be free states.
Missouri was the exception, the last slave state
to be admitted above that line.
Now this compromise worked to stave off political disunion
for 30 years.
But by the 1850s, when a whole bunch of new states
were set to enter the union following Mexico's cession
of this land to the United States,
the compromise was starting to fall apart.
Now what does all this have to do
with a man named Dred Scott?
Dred was an enslaved man
who had been born into slavery in Virginia.
His enslaver eventually moved to Missouri
and when Dred was about 30 years old,
that man sold him to an army doctor named Emerson.
Emerson took Dred to Illinois,
where Dred married his wife Harriet, who was also enslaved.
Emerson went back to Missouri
but left Dred and Harriet in Illinois.
He sold their services as labors and kept the money
that they made, which was definitely illegal
because he was practicing slavery in a free state.
After a year or so, Emerson moved to Louisiana
and married a woman named Eliza Sanford.
And Emerson ordered Dred and Harriet to join them.
They took a steamboat down to Louisiana
and while they were on that steamboat,
Harriet gave birth to a baby girl,
who was lawfully free since she had been born
in free territory.
But the Emersons continued to enslave all three of them.
Eventually, Dr. Emerson died and his wife Eliza Sanford
became the sole owner of the Scott family,
who had moved back to Missouri with her.
In 1846, Dred tried to purchase their freedom from her,
but she refused.
So he filed a freedom suit in Missouri court.
He pled that since he had been taken into a free state,
he should have been freed,
and that his family was being held unjustly.
The case made its way through the courts
over the course of several years.
And in the meantime, Eliza transferred ownership
of the Scotts to her brother, John Sanford.
Since he lived in a different state,
it became a federal case,
and eventually it came before the Supreme Court.
So in 1857, the Supreme Court led at that time by
Chief Justice Roger Taney issued its ruling
in Dred Scott versus Sandford.
You'll notice that Sandford has an extra D in it
in the title because it was entered incorrectly
in the records and never changed.
Taney wrote the majority opinion
and he came to two main conclusions.
First, that Dred Scott couldn't bring suit
in the Supreme Court because he was black
and the descendant of enslaved Africans.
Taney said that he believed the founders
of the United States had never intended for black people,
enslaved or free, to have citizenship rights.
He made a distinction between black people,
who he believed the founders intended
for perpetual servitude, and indigenous people,
who he thought had been treated as members
of separate nations, and therefore could immigrate
to the United States if they wanted to.
What does this tell you about how Taney
was envisioning citizenship and who was eligible
to claim it?
Now generally in cases when the Supreme Court rules
that it doesn't have jurisdiction to hear a case,
it stops there.
It doesn't go on to give any opinion about the merits
of the case itself.
But Taney bucked that convention and went on to make
a ruling about whether going over that Missouri Compromise
line from a slave state to a free one made Dred Scott free.
And he said that it didn't
and that the whole Missouri Compromise
was unconstitutional because it interfered
with slave owners' property rights.
Now it's worth mentioning here that the Dred Scott decision
is universally regarded as the worst Supreme Court decision
of all time.
Not just because it was morally bankrupt,
but also because it wasn't based on sound reasoning.
Taney definitely cherry-picked his evidence
about the founders never intending black people
to be citizens.
For example, he left out the fact that propertied
black men could vote in five of the original 13 states
at the time of the founding.
And that the founders agreed to outlaw slavery
in the Northwest Territory,
both of which suggests that there wasn't any kind
of consensus among the founders about the status
of black people or the future of slavery in the west.
So what was the impact of this decision?
The Supreme Court thought this decision was going to settle
the question about slavery and its spread to the west
for good, but it ended up completely backfiring.
Tensions between the north and south started to reach
a fever pitch after this decision.
Abraham Lincoln started to gain a national following
because of his arguments against this case.
And eventually, civil war would erupt
when Lincoln became president.
After the Civil War, two new amendments to the constitution
would undue the Dred Scott decision.
The 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery,
and the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship rights
for all people born in the United States.
Although Dred Scott lost his case, just two months later,
he did get his freedom.
He didn't get to enjoy it for long though,
since he died just a year later.
His wife Harriet and two daughters did survive
to see the end of slavery and the 14th Amendment.
And his great-great-grandchildren are alive today.