Dred Scott

Around 1799, in Southampton County, Virginia, Dred Scott was born into slavery in the upper South. He was later taken west by owners into Missouri and then by army surgeon John Emerson into Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was restricted by law. Those forced moves created the legal basis for the freedom claim that later reached the federal courts.

Scott filed suit in St. Louis in 1846, arguing that residence in free jurisdiction had made him free under long-standing Missouri precedent. After years of litigation, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Scott v. Sandford in 1857 that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress lacked power to bar slavery in the territories. The decision intensified sectional conflict by attacking the constitutional ground on which many antislavery politicians had stood.

The Scott ruling became one of the most notorious Supreme Court decisions in American history and helped push the nation closer to secession and war. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment directly undermined the constitutional order announced in Scott v. Sandford.