6 März 1857 Jahr - Dred Scott v. Sanford

Beschreibung:

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court in which the Court held that the US Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for black people, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, and so the rights and privileges that the Constitution confers upon American citizens could not apply to them.

The decision was made in the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved black man whose owners had taken him from Missouri, which was a slave-holding state, into the Missouri Territory, most of which had been designated "free" territory by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. When his owners later brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued in court for his freedom and claimed that because he had been taken into "free" US territory, he had automatically been freed and was legally no longer a slave. Scott sued first in Missouri state court, which ruled that he was still a slave under its law. He then sued in US federal court, which ruled against him by deciding that it had to apply Missouri law to the case. He then appealed to the US Supreme Court.

In March 1857, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision against Dred Scott. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Court ruled that black people "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States." Taney supported his ruling with an extended survey of American state and local laws from the time of the Constitution's drafting in 1787 that purported to show that a "perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery." Because the Court ruled that Scott was not an American citizen, any federal lawsuit that he filed automatically failed because he could never establish the "diversity of citizenship" that Article III of the US Constitution requires for a US federal court to be able to exercise jurisdiction over a case. After ruling on those issues surrounding Scott, Taney continued further and struck down the entire Missouri Compromise as a limitation on slavery that exceeded the US Congress's constitutional powers.

Although Taney and several of the other justices hoped that the decision would permanently settle the slavery controversy, which was increasingly dividing the American public, the decision's effect was the complete opposite. Taney's majority opinion "was greeted with unmitigated wrath from every segment of the United States except the slaveholding states," and the decision was a contributing factor in the outbreak of the American Civil War four years later, in 1861. After the Union's victory in 1865, the Court's rulings in Dred Scott were voided by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship for "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof."

The Supreme Court's decision has been widely denounced ever since. Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions—Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it the Court's greatest self-inflicted wound." Junius P. Rodriguez said that it is "universally condemned as the U.S. Supreme Court's worst decision." Historian David Thomas Konig said that it was "unquestionably, our court's worst decision ever."

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