Dred Scott v. Sandford

Dred Scott v. Sandford was a case brought before the United States Supreme Court in the years prior to the American Civil War. The case dealt with a man who had been a slave, and then moved with his master to a state that forbade slavery. When the master wanted to move back south, the slave, Dred Scott, protested, claiming that his residence in the free state had made him free. This led to a ten year long legal battle between the family of Dred Scott and the Sanford family.The Supreme Court Case That Led to The Civil War | Dred Scott v. Sandford The Court's holding, led by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger Taney (who just so happened to be a blatantly biased and deeply racist former slave owner),https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/slavery/people/roger-taney/ had three basic tenets:
#Persons of African descent could not be, nor were ever intended to be, citizens under the Constitution; because of this, Scott had no standing to file a suit.
#Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, and thus, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
#The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment prohibited the federal government from freeing slaves brought into federal territories.
As Taney infamously put it, African Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect".https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/60/393.html Tamey came to this conclusion through looking at not just what the Founding Fathers wrote, but also how they lived. As Jeannie Suk Gersen noted in a 2021 article for The New Yorker:
There was great outcry within the North against this ruling, as it basically made it impossible to abolish slavery anywhere, as well as nullifying the North's benefits from the Missouri Compromise (which was a result of already high tensions around negotiating the slavery problem). Even many northerners who were against abolition thought the ruling was absurd, with Senator Stephen Douglas arguing "that territories could choose not to enforce Dred Scott by withholding protection for slaveholders under local law."Lincoln-Douglas Debates
With that said, the case was popular among the South, with one Georgia newspaper declaring that “The Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery is now the supreme law of the land.” According to them "The view that Southern ideologues such as John C. Calhoun had promoted for more than a decade—that the federal government had a positive, indeed a constitutional, obligation to defend slavery—had apparently triumphed."Dred Scott decision
In its opinion, the Court held that slaves did not enjoy the "privileges and immunities" of citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution sought to supersede Dred Scott by defining citizenship and the "privileges and immunities" of citizenship.
==Irony== 
This decision was originally brought forward to settle slavery tensions in the United States during the antebellum period once and for all. In his inaugural address, James Buchanan even talks about how the country is currently compromising over slavery, saying on the then-upcoming decision of Dred Scott:
We all know how that turned out.
==Modern meaning==
In modern politics, Dred Scott is occasionally used as a dog whistle to disguise opposition to Roe v. Wade. To anti-abortion advocates, just as Dred Scott ruled that African Americans have no rights, Roe v Wade ruled that fetuses have no rights. One example of this is a Daily Wire article from Josh Hammer with the headline "Abortion Is A Grave Injustice. We Must Treat Roe Just Like Dred Scott."HAMMER: Abortion Is A Grave Injustice. We Must Treat Roe Just Like Dred Scott. Hammer writes:
This is nonsensical for numerous reasons, among them that, if one really followed Hammer's logic to its extreme, we would accept the notion that slavery is a Constitutional right. Remember, it took an amendment to the Constitution to end slavery in the United States,Thirteenth Amendment so slavery was understood to at least be Constitutional enough to where amending the document was required to end it.
Also, Republican opposition to slavery cannot be compared to opposition to abortion, if only because Republicans weren't always opposed to women having the legal right to choose.How Republicans Became Anti-Choice Meanwhile, the Republican Party was specifically formed in opposition to the institution of slavery.Republican Party founded
The rather large differences between fully-grown African American people and fetuses is covered up in this analogy (which has rather racist implications). It is also sometimes used as an example of "activist judges" giving an unjust ruling (just as Roe v Wade supposedly was an "activist" ruling that gave an "unjust" result), but the fact of the matter is that the primary injustice was the legality of slavery; any ruling that rejected slavery would have been "activist." If one believes that laws should be followed, and judges should not evaluate them according to their own consciences, then it doesn't make much sense to be bringing up slavery.
==See also==
*Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
*Plessy v. Ferguson, the second-worst United States Supreme Court decision
==Notes==
==References==
Category:United States history
Category:United States law
Category:United States politics
Category:United States Supreme Court cases
Category:Government incompetence
Category:Slavery