- [Instructor] In this video,
I want to give you a very brief overview
of Dred Scott versus Sandford,
a Supreme Court decision made in 1857
that had major consequences
on the definition
of citizenship in the United States.
This case was tied up with so many
of the questions and problems
that plagued America at this
time, particularly slavery
and the westward expansion of the nation,
that it's really easy to go far down
into the rabbit hole on this one.
But I'm gonna try to restrain myself
and just give you the
basics you need to know
to understand what happened in the case
and why it's important.
If you do wanna learn more
about the Dred Scott case,
we have a much more in-depth
video on the subject
that I'll link to in the description.
Okay, so let me set the scene for you.
In the mid-1800s, the U.S.
government had been trying to
balance the desires
and the political power
of the slave-owning southern states
and the free northern states for decades.
They kept making compromises
to keep the union
from falling apart.
And one of these was the
Missouri Compromise of 1820.
The geography of this is important.
So let's take a look at a map
of North America at the time.
So here, you can see the
free states and territories
of the north in green, and
the slave-owning states
and territories in blue.
In 1820, the U.S. government
agreed that to maintain
the balance of power between
slave and free states,
as new states entered the
union from western lands,
new states below this
36 30' line of latitude
would be slave states, and
above it would be free states.
Missouri was the exception,
the last slave state
to be admitted above that line.
Now this compromise worked to
stave off political disunion
for 30 years.
But by the 1850s, when a
whole bunch of new states
were set to enter the union
following Mexico's cession
of this land to the United States,
the compromise was starting to fall apart.
Now what does all this have to do
with a man named Dred Scott?
Dred was an enslaved man
who had been born into
slavery in Virginia.
His enslaver eventually moved to Missouri
and when Dred was about 30 years old,
that man sold him to an
army doctor named Emerson.
Emerson took Dred to Illinois,
where Dred married his wife
Harriet, who was also enslaved.
Emerson went back to Missouri
but left Dred and Harriet in Illinois.
He sold their services as
labors and kept the money
that they made, which
was definitely illegal
because he was practicing
slavery in a free state.
After a year or so,
Emerson moved to Louisiana
and married a woman named Eliza Sanford.
And Emerson ordered Dred
and Harriet to join them.
They took a steamboat down to Louisiana
and while they were on that steamboat,
Harriet gave birth to a baby girl,
who was lawfully free
since she had been born
in free territory.
But the Emersons continued
to enslave all three of them.
Eventually, Dr. Emerson died
and his wife Eliza Sanford
became the sole owner of the Scott family,
who had moved back to Missouri with her.
In 1846, Dred tried to purchase
their freedom from her,
but she refused.
So he filed a freedom
suit in Missouri court.
He pled that since he had
been taken into a free state,
he should have been freed,
and that his family was
being held unjustly.
The case made its way through the courts
over the course of several years.
And in the meantime, Eliza
transferred ownership
of the Scotts to her
brother, John Sanford.
Since he lived in a different state,
it became a federal case,
and eventually it came
before the Supreme Court.
So in 1857, the Supreme
Court led at that time by
Chief Justice Roger
Taney issued its ruling
in Dred Scott versus Sandford.
You'll notice that Sandford
has an extra D in it
in the title because it
was entered incorrectly
in the records and never changed.
Taney wrote the majority opinion
and he came to two main conclusions.
First, that Dred Scott couldn't bring suit
in the Supreme Court because he was black
and the descendant of enslaved Africans.
Taney said that he believed the founders
of the United States had never
intended for black people,
enslaved or free, to
have citizenship rights.
He made a distinction
between black people,
who he believed the founders intended
for perpetual servitude,
and indigenous people,
who he thought had been treated as members
of separate nations, and
therefore could immigrate
to the United States if they wanted to.
What does this tell you about how Taney
was envisioning citizenship
and who was eligible
to claim it?
Now generally in cases when
the Supreme Court rules
that it doesn't have
jurisdiction to hear a case,
it stops there.
It doesn't go on to give
any opinion about the merits
of the case itself.
But Taney bucked that
convention and went on to make
a ruling about whether going
over that Missouri Compromise
line from a slave state to a
free one made Dred Scott free.
And he said that it didn't
and that the whole Missouri Compromise
was unconstitutional because it interfered
with slave owners' property rights.
Now it's worth mentioning here
that the Dred Scott decision
is universally regarded as the
worst Supreme Court decision
of all time.
Not just because it was morally bankrupt,
but also because it wasn't
based on sound reasoning.
Taney definitely
cherry-picked his evidence
about the founders never
intending black people
to be citizens.
For example, he left out
the fact that propertied
black men could vote in five
of the original 13 states
at the time of the founding.
And that the founders
agreed to outlaw slavery
in the Northwest Territory,
both of which suggests
that there wasn't any kind
of consensus among the
founders about the status
of black people or the future
of slavery in the west.
So what was the impact of this decision?
The Supreme Court thought this
decision was going to settle
the question about slavery
and its spread to the west
for good, but it ended
up completely backfiring.
Tensions between the north
and south started to reach
a fever pitch after this decision.
Abraham Lincoln started to
gain a national following
because of his arguments
against this case.
And eventually, civil war would erupt
when Lincoln became president.
After the Civil War, two new
amendments to the constitution
would undue the Dred Scott decision.
The 13th Amendment,
which abolished slavery,
and the 14th Amendment, which
guaranteed citizenship rights
for all people born in the United States.
Although Dred Scott lost his
case, just two months later,
he did get his freedom.
He didn't get to enjoy it for long though,
since he died just a year later.
His wife Harriet and two
daughters did survive
to see the end of slavery
and the 14th Amendment.
And his great-great-grandchildren
are alive today.
