Source: http://federalbarcouncilquarterly.org/?p=769
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 15:04:57+00:00

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There are, perhaps, many candidates for the worst decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, ever: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), for example, or perhaps, Korematsu v. U.S., 323 U.S. 214 (1944). But there really can only be one that ranks at the very bottom: Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1856). And it fully deserves that ranking.
Dred Scott was a slave. Born in America, circa 1800, he was owned by several owners. Importantly, in (or about) 1833, Scott was purchased by U.S. Army surgeon John Emerson in Missouri. Transferred to Fort Armstrong in Illinois, Emerson took Scott with him; Emerson also took Scott with him when he was subsequently transferred to Fort Snelling in the northern section of the Louisiana Purchase (now Minnesota). While at Fort Snelling, Scott married another slave also owned by Emerson (this was a legally recognized marriage because it took place in free territory). Scott’s wife later gave birth to a daughter in free territory. Ultimately, Emerson moved his family and slaves back to St. Louis, Missouri.
In 1843, Emerson died and his wife inherited Scott and his family. In February 1846, Scott attempted to buy his freedom from Mrs. Emerson, but she refused. Scott, with the encouragement of some white friends in St. Louis, then decided to sue for his freedom, based upon his prolonged residence in a free state and a free territory. That began a lengthy legal odyssey that ultimately resulted in the worst decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, ever.
Suing in St. Louis county court in April 1846, Scott initially lost because he was unable to prove that he was in fact owned by Emerson and his widow. But a second trial was ordered, a decision that Mrs. Emerson appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court. She lost that appeal, and in 1850 a jury sided with Scott. That outcome was then appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, which in 1852 rejected prior precedents and overturned the lower court’s outcome, ruling that Missouri law governed Scott’s status, not the fact that he had resided for a number of years in a free state and a free territory.
With a different set of lawyers, Scott then filed a new suit, this time in federal court. Because Scott’s new owner was John F. A. Sandford (Mrs. Emerson’s brother – she had transferred legal ownership of Scott and his family over to Sandford), and he was a legal resident of New York, the jurisdictional basis for the federal lawsuit was diversity of citizenship (Scott claimed Missouri citizenship). Scott sued Sandford for battery and wrongful imprisonment and sought $9,000 in money damages. The federal district judge, Robert W. Wells, rejecting Sandford’s pre-trial argument that Scott could not be a citizen of Missouri because he was a slave, allowed the case to go to trial in May 1854. Although Sandford conceded he had “gently laid his hands” on Scott, he nonetheless won the case (based upon the prior ruling of the Missouri Supreme Court).
Determined to get his freedom, Scott pressed on, and with two new prominent lawyers (Montgomery Blair and George T. Curtis) leading the charge, he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in December 1854. The Court agreed to take the case, first hearing oral argument in February 1856. When the Justices met to discuss the case in April 1856, they were deadlocked four to four on the issue of the Court’s jurisdiction, with Justice Samuel Nelson (New York) undecided. The Court then agreed to have four days of re-argument in December 1856.
Two days later, Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford was handed down.
Chief Justice Roger Taney (Maryland) delivered the opinion of the Court; it was separately agreed to by six other Justices (four Southerners, two Northerners – Grier and Nelson; the latter only concurred based upon Strader v. Graham). The Chief Justice’s first task was to decide whether the Court had jurisdiction: Was Scott a “citizen” of Missouri? As Taney articulated the issue: “It becomes necessary … to determine who were citizens of the several States when the Constitution was adopted.” In page after page of hard to read racism, the Chief Justice listed “evidence” that the Founding Fathers viewed all African-Americans as “being of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” According to Taney, African-Americans were certainly not included in the “all men” “created equal” language of the Declaration of Independence, and they also had not been part of the “sovereign people” who were part of the country created by the Constitution. Thus, having ascertained that African-Americans were not citizens at the time of the country’s founding (“it cannot be believed that the large slaveholding States regarded them as included in the word citizen, or would have consented to a Constitution which might compel them to receive them in that character from another State”), Taney concluded that Dred Scott “was not a citizen of Missouri within the meaning of the Constitution …, and not entitled as such to sue in its courts.” With no jurisdiction, the Chief Justice could have stopped there; but he had even bigger fish to fry: Stephens’ sub rosa source(s) were right – Taney was bent on invalidating the Compromise of 1820, an act of Congress that had barred slavery north of 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude for the land bought from France in the Louisiana Purchase.
The dissents of Justices Curtis and McClean vivisected Taney’s historical “evidence,” as well as his constitutional limitations on Congress’ powers vis-à-vis the territories. Curtis, for example, proved beyond a shadow of doubt that there were many free African-American “citizens” of New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Massachusetts at the time of the Constitution and that they had in fact voted for its ratification!
Of course, the dissents only garnered two votes. Nonetheless, the Dred Scott opinion ignited a volatile firestorm, and Buchanan’s hoped-for peaceful presidential term went the other way in a hurry. It is clear that Taney’s decision helped precipitate the Civil War. And, of course, we are still debating the application of substantive due process today (e.g., Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), etc.). The worst decision by the Supreme Court, ever? It is not even close.
The Compromise of 1820, the legislation ruled unconstitutional by the Court in 1857, had already been repealed by Congress when it enacted the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
After years of wrangling (e.g., the Wilmot Proviso), Congress had tried to legislatively kick the irresolvable political issue of the enforcement of slavery in the territories over to the courts under the terms of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854: “all cases involving title to slaves and ‘questions of personal freedom’ are referred to the adjudication of local tribunals, with the right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.” Ironically, none of the territorial areas that had been the focus of Congress’ hand-to-hand combat over the years – New Mexico, Utah, Kansas, and Nebraska – were areas directly at issue in Dred Scott.
Lincoln built upon these notions, as well as the dissents in Dred Scott, and made them the central tenet of his Cooper Union speech in 1860, a speech which was critical to his getting the Republican presidential nomination (see Federal Bar Council Quarterly (Sept./Oct./Nov. 2011, at 20)).
After the decision was handed down, it was revealed that Dred Scott was still in fact owned by Emerson’s widow, who was now married to an anti-slavery Congressman from Massachusetts. The Congressman’s wife quickly transferred ownership of Scott and his family over to the son of Scott’s original owner on May 26, 1857. The new owner thereafter manumitted the entire family. Scott, now free, lived one more year.
Of Scott’s advocates before the Supreme Court, George Curtis was the brother of Justice Curtis, but no one seemed to care. Montgomery Blair was the scion of a very powerful Democratic Party family, who had shifted over to the Republican Party because of slavery. He later became a member of Lincoln’s cabinet as Postmaster General, resigning in 1864 as part of a deal to ensure that John C. Frémont (the Republican’s 1856 standard-bearer) would drop his third party challenge to Lincoln’s re-election.
Ironically, as a young Maryland lawyer in private practice Taney had taken a very different position on slavery when he defended Rev. Jacob Gruber. In 1819, Gruber had been indicted for a sermon he gave in which he attacked slavery and thus was accused of fomenting a social revolution. Arguing to the jury in defense of his client, Taney said that slavery was “a blot on our national character, and every real lover of freedom confidently hopes that it will effectually, though it must be gradually, wiped away.” See Timothy Huebner, “Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond – and before Dred Scott,” The Journal of American History (June 2010). See also Michael Schoeppner, “Status across Borders: Roger Taney, Black British Subjects, and a Diplomatic Antecedent to the Dred Scott Decision,” The Journal of American History (Jan 2013).
The leading treatise on the Dred Scott decision is Don E. Fehrenbacher’s The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (Oxford University Press, 1978). See also David Konig, Paul Finkelman & Christopher Bracey, The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law (Ohio Press, 2010); Paul Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Books, 1997).

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