When the Supreme Court ruled in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case to strip Black Americans of any citizenship rights, and open the door to expanding slavery in the U.S., the decision galvanized the nation's abolitionist movement.
With heightened urgency to end slavery for 4 million Black Americans, some abolitionists, such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, invoked a moral imperative in pushing for government action. Others saw emigration as the only route to freedom. Still others, like John Brown, were moved to violence.
Who Was Dred Scott and What Was His Case About?
In 1846, Dred Scott and his wife Harriet, an enslaved couple living in Missouri, each filed lawsuits against their owner’s widow, petitioning for their freedom. They based their pro forma suits on the judicial principle of “once free, always free,” arguing that they had been held in wrongful enslavement for an extended period in Illinois and Wisconsin—states that prohibited slavery—before being returned to Missouri, which allowed it.
Their case was originally rejected on a technicality, but they won their freedom in 1850. The decision was then appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, growing in scope and significance, propelled by the raging national debate over who should decide where slavery could be legal. The high court’s ruling, widely considered by many legal scholars to be its worst ever, declared that a Black person had no rights to citizenship and could be enslaved even in a free state. The decision also struck down the Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional, giving Congress no power to limit the expansion of slavery in the territories.
The Dred Scott Decision Lit a Fire Under Lincoln
Less than a year later, senatorial candidate Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” speech at the 1858 Illinois State Republican Convention, declaring that the United States could not permanently exist as half slave and half free.
Lincoln feared the Dred Scott decision would result in slavery being legalized in all states. “What Dred Scott’s master might lawfully do with Dred Scott, in the free state of Illinois,” Lincoln said during his speech, “every other master may lawfully do with any other one, or one thousand slaves, in Illinois, or in any other free state.”
Lincoln had been an anti-slavery advocate for several years, but the Dred Scott decision, according to Eric Foner, a scholar of the 16th president, forced him to more actively contend with the institution of slavery and the status of African Americans.
“Lincoln’s point in the House Divided speech was not the imminence of Civil War but that Illinois voters, and all Americans, must choose between supporting or opposing slavery,” wrote Foner in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.
Frederick Douglass: ‘A Necessary Link in the Chain’
Frederick Douglass, a self-emancipated slave who by 1857 was one of the best known orators and newspaper publishers in the country, called the Dred Scott decision a “vile and shocking abomination.” He had admired Lincoln’s House Divided speech, calling the future president a statesman and capable of uniting all the political and moral forces to end slavery. In his own speech following the case, Douglass assured his New York audience that slavery’s end was “morally certain.”
For Douglass, Dred Scott was a part of a “necessary link in the chain of events” that would lead to the downfall of slavery in America. He reminded his audience of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 that made the Federal Government responsible for returning runaway slaves to their owners. Another stunning blow to the anti-slavery supporters had come in 1854 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, opening new territories to the expansion of the slavery. For pro-slavery advocates, particularly, the Dred Scott decision was the final factor that settled slavery as a national issue.
Freedom By Emigration
If Douglass appeared energized by Dred Scott in his quest for emancipation, other Black leaders used the controversy to invigorate calls for violence and emigration as routes to freedom for their people.
If African Americans couldn’t be citizens, what was the point of staying in the country, reasoned Martin Delany, an abolitionist who had been one of the first Black students admitted to Harvard Medical School before being dismissed within weeks because of protests by white students and faculty. Henry Highland Garnet, a minister and abolitionist, sounded calls for violence, if necessary. “Our people will not always consent to be trodden under foot; they will arm themselves someday, if need be, to secure their rights,” he said in his famously militant 1843 speech "An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America" at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York.
A fierce proponent of emigration to Africa, Garnet lobbied for emigration to Liberia, a country in West Africa founded by white Americans in 1820 as a place to resettle free Black people. On this issue, he sparred with Douglass, who believed that the best chance for African Americans was to fight for equal rights in the United States.
John Brown's Harpers Ferry Raid
By the time of the Dred Scott decision, John Brown was already planning his raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. But he and Black abolitionists were convinced that after Dred Scott, slavery could not be ended by legislation or court action. Brown worked to build alliances with radical free Black populations in Maryland, who feared the decision would lead to their re-enslavement.
State legislatures in New York, Ohio, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania took steps to defy Dred Scott. In the wake of the decision, the Massachusetts legislature called for Supreme Court judges to be elected by the people for terms, instead of having lifetime appointments. New Hampshire took one of the most radical steps, calling for “all races and colors the same rights as white citizens.”
On October 16, 1859, Brown and a small band of supporters seized the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but were quickly surrounded by U.S. Marines. In the ensuing standoff, 10 of Brown’s men were killed, including two of his sons. Brown, convicted of treason, was sent to the gallows. But his raid helped place slavery in the center of national debate, pushing the country further toward Civil War.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates Spotlight the Slavery Issue
Lincoln would lose to Stephen Douglas in the 1858 U.S. Senatorial election in Illinois, but not before the two men put the Dred Scott decision and the issue of slavery on full display in seven debates across the state. Douglas used Lincoln’s views on the expansion of slavery and the belief in the inalienable rights of African Americans to cast him as a dangerous “Black Republican,” stoking white fears of a Black takeover of society.
Lincoln, in turn, attacked Douglass for his support of the Dred Scott decision. During their second debate in Freeport, Illinois, on August 27, 1858, the two candidates took the case head on. Neither man supported slavery, and both believed in white superiority. But they disagreed over who should hold the power to control the spread of the institution in the country. Douglas believed states should have the sovereignty to allow slavery within their borders. Only the federal government, Lincoln countered, should have the power to abolish slavery or control its expansion.
Douglass may have won reelection to the U.S. Senate, but the campaign and the debates made Lincoln a star. They ensured his future on the national stage as a viable candidate for the presidency—one who would bring slavery to what he called in his House Divided speech its “ultimate extinction.”
'Dangerous Political Heresy'
Two years later, as Lincoln emerged as the Republican nominee to the 1860 presidential election, the Dred Scott decision was challenged in the party’s official platform, which called it a “dangerous political heresy” that was “subversive of the peace and harmony of the country.” The Democratic Party, in its 1860 platform, sought to insert a plank codifying the decision through Congressional legislation.
Less than two months after Lincoln’s inauguration as president, the newly formed breakaway Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter off Charleston’s harbor on April 12, 1861 to start a bloody four-year Civil War that would claim an estimated 620,000 lives. The war would determine that the country could not be a, Lincoln said, a house divided, half slave and half free. The 13th and 14th Amendments would overturn the Dred Scott decision. While it was one of the most infamous decisions in Supreme Court history, the case was for many, as Frederick Douglass put it, a necessary link in the chain of events to end slavery.
For their part, Dred and Harriet Scott were emancipated by their new owner three months after—and in spite of—the Supreme Court decision.
