Why was the Dred Scott decision so divisive?

Question

This was the Dred Scott case in 1857, when a black man tried to sue for freedom on the basis of his long residence on free soil.

Answer 1

In March of 1857, Scott lost the decision as seven out of nine Justices on the Supreme Court declared no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen, or ever had been a U.S. citizen. As a non-citizen, the court stated, Scott had no rights and could not sue in a Federal Court and must remain a slave.

At that time there were nearly 4 million slaves in America. The court's ruling affected the status of every enslaved and free African-American in the United States. The ruling served to turn back the clock concerning the rights of African-Americans, ignoring the fact that black men in five of the original States had been full voting citizens dating back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The Supreme Court also ruled that Congress could not stop slavery in the newly emerging territories and declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to be unconstitutional. The Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery north of the parallel 36°30´ in the Louisiana Purchase. The Court declared it violated the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution which prohibits Congress from depriving persons of their property without due process of law.

Anti-slavery leaders in the North cited the controversial Supreme Court decision as evidence that Southerners wanted to extend slavery throughout the nation and ultimately rule the nation itself. Southerners approved the Dred Scott decision believing Congress had no right to prohibit slavery in the territories. Abraham Lincoln reacted with disgust to the ruling and was spurred into political action, publicly speaking out against it.

Overall, the Dred Scott decision had the effect of widening the political and social gap between North and South and took the nation closer to the brink of Civil War.

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I find it interesting the Missouri Compromise was found unconstitutional. The state of Maine and Missouri were found with that compromise, so would the formation of those states be null and void since in wasn't constitutional to begin with ?

http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/dred.htm

Answer 2

Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that because Dred Scott was a black man, he had no rights to sue in the courts. And then Taney went on to say that the Missouri Compromise was un-constitutional and was null and void, so any slave-holder could move his "property" into a non-slave holding state and that person would still be a slave. It so angered the Northerners, that this was one of the 5 events leading to the Civil War.

Answer 3

In retrospect we can apply current interpretations of the Constitution and suggest (some even aver) that the Taney Court was in error in its opinion of the Dred Scott v. Sandford [1857] case. However, at the time it was anything but straight foreword. Two very good works have been published attempting to produce an interpretation of this case with greater depth and they are:
They Have No Rights: Dred Scott's Struggle for Freedom by Walter Ehrlich
And. . . .
The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics by Don E. Fehrenbacher
A little history: Dred Scott, who was a slave in Missouri, was taken by his owner in 1836 to Fort Snelling, which was in the free portion of the Louisiana Territory. When his owner died, Dred Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds that when he was taken into a place that outlawed slavery, he had become free. His argument was rejected in the Missouri courts, but when his new owner turned his title over to a John Sanford who lived in New York, Dred Scott felt that he could sue in Federal court because his new owner was in a different state. (The Constitution in Article III, Section 2 says of the Supreme Court "The judicial power shall extend to all cases…between citizens of different states.")
The Supreme Court heard the case (Dred Scott v. Sandford) in 1857, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was Roger Taney, who wrote the majority opinion. He addressed the jurisdiction of the United States Courts (as opposed to state courts): "…if the plaintiff (Scott) claims a right to sue in a Circuit Court of the United States, under the provision of the Constitution which gives jurisdiction in controversies between citizens of different states, he must distinctly aver in his pleading that they are citizens of different states…," and since Scott was a slave in Missouri, Taney and the court could have simply found that Scott was considered property and not a citizen of the United States, and therefore, did not have a right to sue in federal court. End of story. At that time it would have been a proper finding, but Taney had other things in mind.
Taney wrote: "…can a *****, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights…guaranteed by that instrument…?" There are 17 pages where Taney shows that Negroes were not considered citizens at the time the Constitution was written (he quotes various statutes of the U.S. Congress, and the different states; he quotes the Declaration of Independence, he quotes from the Articles of Confederation), he concludes that the ancestors of African slaves are not citizens of the United States even if they had been freed by the states! To support this weird theory, Justice Taney refers again and again to the two clauses in the Constitution that refer to slavery: Article I, Section 9, which says that the importation of slaves must cease in 1808, and Article IV, Section 2, which says that slaves who escape from one state must be delivered back to the owner. Further, Taney says, "…certainly these two clauses were not intended to confer on them (slaves) or their posterity the blessings of liberty…"
Taney addresses the argument that Scott made about being taken into the free portion of the Louisiana Territory: "The act of Congress, upon which the plaintiff relies (known to us as the Missouri Compromise), declares that slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, shall be forever prohibited in all that part of the territory ceded by France, under the name of Louisiana, which lies north of thirty six degrees thirty minutes north latitude, and not included within the limits of Missouri. And the difficulty which meets us at the threshold of this part of the inquiry is, whether Congress was authorized to pass this law under any of the powers granted to it by the Constitution…" Of course, Article IV, Sec. 3 says: "The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States." Taney brushes this off by stating that only the states have the right to outlaw slavery, ignoring Congress's power in the territories. Somehow the "right" to own slaves cannot be infringed upon by the U.S. Congress, and according to Taney, by outlawing slavery, Congress had deprived slaveholders of their property without a fair trial. In a 5-4 ruling, the Taney Court voided the Missouri Compromise.
What is the significance for us, today? After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment, which freed the slaves, and the 14th Amendment, which made them citizens, were passed to change Taney's Supreme Court decision.
Making the suggestion that the Taney Court decision in the Dred Scott case contributed to on set of hostilities in what would become the American War of the 1860s may be an overreaching of such justification. Certainly it incited at least some of the abolitionists (Lysander Spooner may have been an exception) but to say it led to war would require that slavery was the cause of the war and that is not proven.