Thinking About Dred Scott

"The Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

This sums up 19th century white American views towards blacks. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who gave the majority opinion in 1857's Dred Scott v. Sanford, ruled that the federal government has no role in slavery's expansion in federal territories or other states. It basically destroyed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (Mason-Dixon Line) and the Compromise of 1850, which had prevented the expansion of slavery in the West and Northwestern territories and states. Taney himself came from a Catholic slaveholding family in Maryland, thus it comes as no surprise he would deny blacks citizenship and declare that the federal government cannot control where slaveholders take their 'property.' This case is obviously well-known in American history for further polarizing the slave and non-slave states of the Union, leading to the inevitable Civil War.

My own interests in the Dred Scott case extend beyond the above. Of course this case was perhaps one of the most important Supreme Court cases in US history because the Supreme Court removed the federal government's power to regulate the expansion of slavery. And the statements about the impossibility of blacks attaining citizenship in this country since it was established for whites only during its inception remains a recurrent them in African-American political thought. My own interests in the case lie more with Dred Scott's life and background, since his own story is usually overlooked because of the enormous ramifications of the Supreme Court ruling, which did forcefully push the United States toward the Civil War.

Dred Scott was born in 1795, and died in 1858, one year after his Supreme Court case. Dred and Harriet Scott, legally slaves in the South, resided with their white master in the Wisconsin Territory (modern Minnesota) for several years. Of course this territory was 'free,' so Dred Scott and his wife should not have had to remain in service to their white man. Of course, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would've demanded that the authorities of the territory return Dred and his wife to their master, but if they were already established there for years, weren't they technically free?

What I would like to know is why Dred Scott and his wife endeavored to get legal freedom when they had essentially been free the entire time? Perhaps due to advanced age the couple believed they could not run away, but that would not be enough to prevent me from just running away to another Northern territory or state. And since the majority of white folks were opposed to slavery in the North, I doubt it would have been hard for the Scotts to escape or just not return to Missouri. I doubt the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would have been enforced with enough effort to capture Dred Scott if he had just moved to a different town. However, Scott had sought a legal way for his freedom as early as the 1840s, but each time was shot down by state and a federal court for various reasons.

Perhaps he had really hoped his emancipation would be legally won in court because of the precedent established by previous court cases such as the freedom suit of a slave woman, Rachel, in 1834 (of course freedom suits have a history going all the way back to the colonial period as well). But Rachel v. Walker was won by Rachel since the Supreme Court of Missouri ruled that her master, a Missouri soldier in the Army, wanted to take her with him to Michigan, which was obviously free territory. Since Michigan was free territory, the State Supreme Court ruled that army officer forfeited his property by taking her and her son into Michigan. Interestingly, the courts of Missouri did not consider African American slaves citizens, yet they could file for freedom since they were considered poor persons.  Of course the State Supreme Court ruling that slavery could not be expanded in free states was surprising since Missouri was a slave state, yet the court upheld the Missouri Compromise and a previous precedent of once free, always free for enslaved blacks.

Anyway, the Dred Scott case is even more interesting since blacks have been filing suits for over a century by the time the Supreme Court ruled slaves were not citizens. The fact that blacks had been able to win their freedom legally through state and federal courts previously had established a precedent for black citizenship that the Supreme Court claimed unconstitutional. Thus, the legal status of slaves was never agreed upon in the first place, with some states giving some legal rights to slaves in border states and free states. Perhaps Dred Scott did make a rational decision then when he filed a freedom suit in Missouri for himself, his wife, and children. Unfortunately for him (and African Americans everywhere), the slavery supporters within the Supreme Court and the ideological shift despite legal precedent overruled centuries of freedom suits.

The funny thing about Dred Scott v. Sanford is that Scott and his family were eventually freed three months after the ruling because of pressure from an abolitionist Congressman married to the owner of Scott got her to return Scott to the family that had owned him when he lived in Alabama. By this time, the family that originally owned Scott were abolitionists living in Missouri, so they freed him. In my opinion, Scott should have taken matters in his own hands while living in free territory, but in retrospect, perhaps his pursuit of freedom for his family via legal means was rational, since he first filed for his freedom in the 1840s, before the state of Missouri and the Southern states became more hostile to attempts to limit the expansion of slavery in the 1850s. Moreover, the Scott case exemplifies the ambiguity of African American citizenship/rights in the United States. If blacks could file suits for freedom, and some courts recognized their rights to freedom in free states (at least, prior to the 1850s), then how come African Americans are not citizens? Furthermore, if African Americans are not citizens despite birth in the United States, then what are they? How can 3/5 of the entire slave population be counted for Congressional representation for the South? The ambiguities of black legal status would carry over after the Civil War and during, when some whites such as Lincoln considered black deportations to Haiti or Liberia as the only way to solve the race problem.