Dred Scott v. Sandford

6 March 1857, in Washington

On 6 March 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the Supreme Court's opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford. It came two days after James Buchanan's inauguration, in which the new president had urged acceptance of the still-forthcoming decision.

The Court rejected Scott's federal suit on the ground that a person descended from Africans imported and sold as slaves — enslaved or free — could not be a United States citizen for purposes of federal diversity jurisdiction.

And then it went further

Taney's opinion also declared the Missouri Compromise's territorial slavery restriction unconstitutional, reasoning that Congress could not deprive a slaveholder of that claimed property without due process under the Fifth Amendment.

It concluded that Dred Scott and his family had not become free through residence at Fort Snelling, in federal territory where Congress had prohibited slavery.

The familiar "7–2" shorthand flattens the record: every justice wrote separately and they did not all join every proposition in Taney's opinion. Benjamin R. Curtis and John McLean dissented.

Eighty-one days

The immediate judgment left Dred, Harriet, Eliza and Lizzie Scott enslaved. Their owners transferred them to Taylor Blow, who emancipated the family on 26 May 1857, 81 days after the ruling.

The decision itself was never overturned in the ordinary appellate sense. It was constitutionally superseded, and the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause directly repudiated Taney's conclusion.