Ivory marked by the Royal African Company. International Slavery Museum, Liverpool. Wikimedia Commons.
The Supreme Court said Black people were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories.
A poor Black family, even in a free state, was told the Constitution did not count them among the political people.
A northern household that had relied on the Missouri Compromise line learned the Court had thrown that line out.
Slaveholders won a ruling that treated enslaved people as property the federal government must not take away in the territories.
In Dred Scott v.
Sandford, decided in 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney held that Scott’s years on free soil did not free him and that he could not sue because he was not a citizen.
The Court also held that the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery violated the Fifth Amendment’s protection of property.
A suit about one man’s status became a national rule for slavery in the West.
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case (1978)