case that came (1856–57) before the U.S. Supreme Court, and that involved determination of the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise and of the legal right of a black to become a citizen of the U.S. Dred Scott (1795?–1858) was a slave owned by an army surgeon, John Emerson (fl. 1833–43) of Missouri. In 1836 Scott had been taken by Emerson to Fort Snelling, in what is now Minnesota, then a territory in which slavery was forbidden according to the terms of the Missouri Compromise. While still on free territory, Scott had been allowed to marry a woman who was also a slave owned by Emerson. In 1846, after an attempt at self-purchase, Scott brought suit in the state court on the grounds that residence in a free territory released him from slavery. The Supreme Court of Missouri, however, ruled (1852) that upon his being brought back to territory where slavery was legal, the status of slavery reattached to him and he had no standing before the court.

The case was brought before the federal circuit court, which took jurisdiction but held against Scott. The case was taken on appeal to the Supreme Court, where it was argued at length in 1855 and 1856 and finally decided in 1857. The decision handed down by a majority vote of the Court was that there was no power in the existing form of government to make citizens slave or free, and that at the time of the formation of the U.S. Constitution they were not, and could not be, citizens in any of the states. Accordingly, Scott was still a slave and not a citizen of Missouri, from which it followed that he had no right to sue in the federal courts.

The decision of the majority was matched in importance by the views expressed by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney as obiter dicta. These opinions went beyond the actual point to be settled to the extent of asserting that Scott, having originally been a slave and therefore a mere chattel, might, according to the law of Missouri, be taken like any other chattel, anywhere within the jurisdiction of the U.S.; that the Missouri Compromise was in violation of the Constitution; and that slavery could not be prohibited by Congress in the territories of the U.S. The case, and particularly the court’s dicta, aroused intense bitterness among the abolitionists, further widened the breach between the North and South, and was among the causes of the American Civil War.        B.Q., BENJAMIN QUARLES, M.A., Ph.D.

For further information on this topic, see the Bibliography, sections 255. U.S. Supreme Court, 1146. African American history.