According to the Dred Scott decision, could slaves ever be considered full citizens? Why or why not?

Answer 1

No.

In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court ruled that no slave - nor even any freeborn black - could ever become a US citizen.

The court ruled that a slave whose owner brought him into a free State could petition the court for his freedom while he was in that State, but if they returned to a slave State, he couldn't use his stay in a free State to win his freedom there.

Scott relied heavily on the legal logic of Lord Mansfield in "Somersets case" heard in the English High court a few years earlier.

Somerset was the slave of a resident of Boston who brought him to England on a Jamaican registered ship. While the ship was in England, he escaped, and got ashore. His owner caught him and returned him to the ship. A lawyer heard about this and petitioned the court for a writ of Habeus Corpus. Somerset's owner claimed that although slavery was illegal in England, taking Somerset away from him on a Jamaican ship was an illegal deprivation of his property.

Lord Mansfield (The Chief Justice) wrote the ruling himself, quoting the language of a case from 1569 where a merchant was convicted of assault for whipping a slave he'd bought in Russia and brought back to England "The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe, for the moment he breath it, he is slave no more"

The US court under the law of the time - which held that the rulings of English courts from prior to independance were still binding precedent - "should" have agreed, and freed Scott, but instead they relied on the language of the "Missouri Compromise" and ruled that once Scott returned to a slave State with his master, he lost the right to petition for his freedom.

Richard