In the history of the United States Supreme Court, there are a multitude of cases that have left an indelible mark in the tapestry of American history, culture, and society. Among these landmark disputes may be found issues as divisive as reproductive health, fundamental economic freedoms, the power of the Supreme Court and, of course, race. Among these, Dred Scott v. Sanford occupies a special place. Often called as the “worst decision made by the Supreme Court”, Dred Scott v. Sanford provided an impetus for slavers to continue an injustice that had existed since the colonial era. By deciding the way it did, the United States Supreme Court also created a divide between the northern and southern states – a divide so great that it eventually led to the American Civil War. Such an enormous effect on the sentiment of the times warrants a closer look at the decisions of the justices involved in the Dred Scott decision. Doing so will also shed light into the intricate logic behind the justices’ decisions – essentially the reasons why they concurred or dissented from the main opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. The process of interrogating the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution will also reveal the fundamental societal sentiment regarding slavery and African Americans at the time.
Dred Scott was an African American slave that sued for his and his family’s freedom, relying on his claim that his ownership to Dr. John Emerson, and later to John Sanford, had been extinguished when they entered a free state. He relied on the mantra of “once free, forever free” in his argument that, since he had been taken for a lengthy period of time into a free state, he should be considered a free man, even though he had eventually been returned to a slave state (Hall and Huebner 101). At the heart of Dred Scott v. Sanford is the question of Dred Scott’s citizenship, which in turn rested on whether the Missouri Compromise was constitutional, since Scott’s freedom hinged on the compromise being valid at the time Scott was taken into Wisconsin Territory and, later, into Illinois. John Sanford’s lawyers, on the other hand, argued that the Missouri Compromise prohibiting slavery in the aforementioned Wisconsin Territory and Illinois was unconstitutional. This argument essentially invalidated Scott’s claim to freedom, and, consequently, his right to sue.
The Court’s decision, handed down on March 6, 1857, declared Dred Scott a slave, by a vote of seven to two. The meat of the discussion regarding the question of Scott’s citizenship was divisive. Three of the justices, including Chief Justice Taney, Justice Peter V. Daniel, and Justice James Wayne, stated that not only was Scott not a citizen, but that no blacks in America were entitled to citizenship. Taney, in his majority opinion, stated that the authors of the Declaration of Independence had not planned to include black people when they wrote, “all men are created equal”. Seven of the justices – everyone except Justice Benjamin Curtis and Justice John McLean, both northerners – agreed that Scott’s status as a slave or a free man would be determined by the laws of Missouri, even if he had lived in a free state and territory. Judicial precedent dictated that any master who took his slave to a free territory or state had in effect freed that slave. This was the practice since 1824, until Dred Scott overturned it. Taney explained that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional, and that the Constitution had guaranteed citizens the right to own property. Since slaves were considered property, the federal government had no right, according to the Chief Justice, to restrict where slave owners could take their slaves. Taney went so far as writing that African Americans were “beings of an inferior orderso far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”.
It is important here to note that Taney did not reject black citizenship per se. His opinion explicitly stated that black persons living in foreign countries were eligible to become American citizens. Congress was authorized, according to the Chief Justice, to “authorize the naturalization of any one, of any color, who was born under allegiance to another Government”. The only persons that Taney declared permanently ineligible for citizenship in the Dred Scott decision were slaves and free blacks born in the United States.
On the other hand, Justices Curtis and McLean were the only dissenters to the majority opinion. In particular, Curtis argued vehemently in opposition to the majority opinion’s claim that Scott, and other African Americans for that matter, were not citizens. Both of them argued that historically, blacks had participated in American politics by the time of the American Revolution and that blacks certainly had voted as citizens. Justice Curtis wrote:
“At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, all free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens”.
Curtis and McLean’s dissenting opinions were essentially a product of an enlightened and progressive northern education. In contrast to the sentiments in favor of Dred Scott’s slavery, their opinions relied heavily on well-established judicial precedent that reflected a sound constitutional conservatism. Curtis’s opinion directly attacked Taney’s reasoning in the majority opinion, and rested his own conclusions upon the original understanding of those who made the Constitution. Moreover, Curtis demolished Taney’s arguments against black citizenship by noting that citizenship did not entitle a person to any particular rights and by pointing to a North Carolina case that explicitly declared free black inhabitants to be citizens of that state.
The fundamental difference between the majority opinion and the dissent may be seen in their respective viewpoint on the nature of slaves, in general. For the Chief Justice and six other Justices in the bench, they determined whether slaves were people or property. Taney’s argument was essentially intentionalist: Blacks could not be United States citizens because the Framers never intended to grant them citizenship. When the Constitution was adopted, Taney insisted, blacks were “considered a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had just been subjugated by the dominant race”. At the heart of his reasoning is racism. He narrowly interpreted the broad language of the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitution. Moreover, he combined this historical argument with a fixed and intentionalist mode of constitutional interpretation. The Constitution, he said, speaks “not only in the same words, but with the same meaning and intent with which it spoke when it came from the hands of its framers”.
On the other hand, the dissenting opinion focused on whether or not they were citizens. This latter view is more correct: not only because it was more humane, but because these were the arguments initially put forth by the plaintiff. Albeit operating in the same historical arena, Justice Curtis developed a radically different conception of American citizenship. He used the evidence of black citizenship in the five states to argue that blacks were members of the political community that formed the national government. Moreover, he conceded to the states’ authority to determine who qualified for citizenship. For him, race was not a qualification for citizenship under the Federal Constitution and blacks were among the People of the United States.
In essence, the failure of the majority opinion led by Taney may be seen in a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the Supreme Court in deciding cases as critical to the history and future of the American nation as Dred Scott. The fault was in the Court’s decision to answer the constitutional legitimacy of the decision, rather than its morality. Doing so made the Supreme Court an inflexible and unreasonable steward of the originalistic interpretation of the United States Constitution. There, as they say, lies the rub. By relying on the original meaning of the Constitution to deprive African Americans their rights, the majority opinion of Dred Scott v. Sanford also deprived the American people of a progressive and more humane future.
Works Cited
Finkelman, Paul. Dred Scott v. Sanford: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford, 1997. Print.
Hall, Kermit L. and Huebner, Timothy S. Major Problems in American Constitutional History, 2nd edition. Boston: Wadsworth, 2010. Print.
Urofsky, Melvin, and Finkelman, Paul. A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States, Vol. 1, 3rd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.
