While Scott had convinced the court that it had the jurisdiction to hear his case, he still had to prove that his travels to Illinois and Fort Snelling had freed him under the law of Missouri. The case went to trial in 1854. Judge Wells, though sympathetic to the Scotts, had no choice but to give a charge that reflected the ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court in Scott v. Emerson, since the federal case concerned solely a wrongful imprisonment charge and Scott had never proven unequivocally in any state case that he was declared free in Illinois. This amounted to a continuation of Scott’s servitude.

Scott’s attorneys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sitting on that highest court were four slave state justices, four justices from free states and Roger Taney from Maryland, a border state that permitted slavery.

It is easy in hindsight to see why the Scott lawyers might have viewed Taney as a possible fifth vote in their favor. As a young lawyer, Taney had defended an abolitionist minister against charges of inciting slaves to rebellion. In his summation, he told the jury in defense of his client that ‘Until the time shall come when we can point without a blush, to the language in the Declaration of Independence, every friend of humanity will seek to lighten the galling chain of slavery and better, to the utmost of his power, the wretched condition of the slave.’ The jury, made up mostly of slave owners, acquitted the minister.

Taney had freed his own slaves and, after joining the Supreme Court, voted to free the slaves in the Amistad case. Once called a man with a ‘moonlit mind’ because it shone with ‘all of the moon’s brightness but none of its glare,’ Taney had sided with Northern interests in nonslavery cases. In appearance he was frail and soft-spoken, to some resembling an old wizard, but his eyes shone with bright and piercing intelligence.

The case was argued in the Supreme Court in 1855 and again in late 1856, just as Americans began to debate slavery with more than words. On May 21, 1856, border ruffians sacked the free-state town of Lawrence, Kan., in the conflict known as ‘Bleeding Kansas.’ The next day, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, an outspoken abolitionist, was beaten half to death on the floor of the U.S. Senate by South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks. Two days after that John Brown — who, as one of his sons remembered, went ‘crazy’ at the news of the beating — led a raid on Osawatomie, Kan., killing five pro-slavery men.

The Scott case also coincided with tragedy in the Taney family. For many years, the family had vacationed at Old Point Comfort near Norfolk, Va. In the summer that the case reached the Supreme Court, an outbreak of cholera was reported in Norfolk. Taney’s daughter, Alice, was invited by concerned friends to vacation instead in Newport, R.I. She asked her father’s permission in a letter. He wrote in response, ‘I have not the slightest confidence in the superior health of Newport over Old Point and I look upon it as nothing more than that unfortunate feeling of inferiority in the South, which believes everything in the North to be superior to what we have.’

Taney’s daughter canceled plans to vacation in Newport and went to Old Point Comfort, where she contracted cholera and died. Her mother died of a stroke the same day. Taney, then 78 years old, had begun writing his autobiography at Old Point Comfort. As Taney biographer Carl Swisher wrote: ‘The broken-hearted family boarded a boat for Baltimore. Taney was leaving Old Point, the scene of many happy summers and of one terrible tragedy, never to return, and the writing of the story of his life, which had begun there, was never to be resumed.’ Another historian suggested that the tragedy deprived Taney of emotional reserves necessary to maintain judicial balance.

In the Supreme Court, Dred Scott was represented by Montgomery Blair, from one of the most influential families in American politics. John Sanford was represented by Missouri Senator Henry Geyer and Reverdy Johnson, regarded as the country’s leading Supreme Court advocate. After the first argument, it was clear that Geyer and Johnson were defending nothing less than slavery itself. In response to Scott’s claim to freedom by virtue of residence in a territory where slavery had been banned by the Missouri Compromise, they argued that the Compromise was unconstitutional. In challenging the authority of Congress to limit the expansion of slavery, the Sanford attorneys struck at the foundation of the legislative compromises that had saved the Union.

Instead of issuing an opinion, the Supreme Court set the case down for another argument in December 1856. That November, Democrat James Buchanan won the presidential election, beating John Frmont, the candidate of the emerging Republican Party. According to Fehrenbacher, when the Scott case was argued yet again, on December 15, 1856, ‘Every one of the nine justices must have realized by this time that the Court had an explosive package on its hands. Many more people were now aware of what might be at stake in one Negro’s suit for freedom.’

Following the second argument, the Supreme Court was initially divided. Finally, a majority coalesced around a sweeping opinion. At the suggestion of Justice James M. Wayne, the author would be Chief Justice Taney, who, according to Fehrenbacher, ‘behind his mask of judicial propriety’ had become ‘a bitter sectionalist, seething with anger at Northern insult and Northern aggression.’

In February 1857, Justice John Catron of Tennessee wrote to president-elect Buchanan, urging him to press Pennsylvania’s Justice Robert C. Grier to join a majority opinion. Buchanan wrote to Justice Grier, who agreed to concur with the chief justice. Buchanan, now privy to the forthcoming ruling, declared at his inauguration on March 4, 1857, that the Supreme Court would soon settle the issue of ‘when the people of a Territory shall decide this question [slavery] for themselves.’ By today’s standards, and perhaps even in those days, Buchanan’s statement was a flagrant breach of judicial ethics.

On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court was filled, and many were turned away. For two hours, Chief Justice Taney, about to turn 80 years old, read from the Court’s opinion in a nearly inaudible voice. He first held that Scott, as a Negro of African ancestry, had no rights, including the right to sue in federal court as a citizen: ‘They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and, so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect….’

Taney then went on to issue a stunning ruling that attempted to end the slavery controversy forever. He held that Congress had no power to bar slavery in the territories because, among other things, Negroes in bondage are property and the Constitution protects property owners from deprivation of their property without due process of law: ‘the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.’ The final vote was 7-2 against Scott. Only Ohio’s Justice John Mclean and Massachusetts’ Justice Benjamin R. Curtis voted in Scott’s favor.

That morning freedom had been national and slavery local. By the afternoon, it was the other way around. The country was a tinderbox, and now the Supreme Court had lit a match. Angry Northern editorials denounced the opinion, calling it, in one paper’s words, ‘no better than what might be obtained in a Washington City bar room fight.’ The abolitionist ministers preached resistance to the decision, saying that ‘if the people obey this decision, they disobey God.’ Northern legislatures passed laws that said no person in the state should be considered as property, and set free every slave who came into the state. For the first time, Northern anger was not directed only at the expansion of slavery but at the South.

Southern editors called the decision ‘right and the argument unanswerable, we presume, but whether or not, what this tribunal decides the Constitution to be, that it is; and patriotic men will acquiesce.’ In Southern opinion, the decisions covered every question regarding slavery, including the inferior status of Negroes, and settled it in favor of the South. Southerners warned that the opinion must be accepted by the North or there would be disunion.

For two months Justice Taney refused to publish his opinion, and even ordered the Supreme Court clerk not to give a copy to dissenting Justice Curtis. Meanwhile, Taney was rewriting sections of his opinion to respond to the cascade of Northern anger that had descended on the Supreme Court. When he finally allowed it to be published, reporters who had been at the court noted that parts of the published opinion did not correspond to their notes and, if read aloud at the same pace as Taney’s delivery, appeared to be a third longer.

In 1858 Justice Curtis resigned from the Supreme Court, denying that he did so because of Scott v. Sandford. That same year, on August 27 in Freeport, Ill., Republican Senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln and Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas held the second of their famous debates, which were largely about the Dred Scott case.

Lincoln posed the famous Second Freeport Question to Douglas, ‘Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wishes of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?’ Douglas was impaled on the barbed choice between appeasing the Northern wing of his party by repudiating the Dred Scott decision, while losing the Southern wing if he did, and vice versa. He answered with a gusto that ultimately satisfied no one by stating, ‘the people have the lawful means to introduce or exclude it as they please.’ He won the election, but Lincoln became a national figure.

At its 1860 convention, the Democratic Party came apart over the Dred Scott decision. When their request for adoption of a national slave code based on the decision was rejected, the states that would later secede from the Union after Lincoln’s election, with the exception of Arkansas, walked out of the convention. Lincoln ran as the sole Republican candidate for president against a fractured Democratic Party that produced three candidates, one being Stephen A. Douglas.

In one of the most ironic moments in American history, Chief Justice Taney swore in Lincoln as president in 1861. As historian Charles Warren later wrote, Taney ‘elected Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency.’ Shortly after that the Civil War, America’s defining moment, began.

In 1859 Taney sat for a portrait by the painter Emanuel Leutze. By then, the year of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, it was clear to Taney that the nation was headed for catastrophe. The chief justice wears black robes in the portrait. His left hand rests on a pad of paper, while his right hand hangs limply, almost lifelessly against the right arm of the chair. His eyes are bleak, as though he had seen into a ruinous future that he had wrought, but had not intended and could never undo. Taney remained on the court during the Civil War until his death in 1864. He was described by a diarist of the time as one of the saddest figures in Washington.

And what of his adversary, Dred Scott? In a bizarre turn, after she lost the trial in Scott v. Emerson, Irene Emerson married Dr. Calvin Chaffee, a Massachusetts congressman and outspoken abolitionist. After the Supreme Court’s decision, newspaper reporters tracked her down and discovered her remarriage. By now, John Sanford was in an insane asylum, which left Irene Emerson Chaffee in charge of his ‘property.’

Apparently, Irene had not informed her husband of her slaveholding past. Abolitionist Representative Chaffee awoke one morning to discover that he was married to the most famous slave owner in America. A Massachusetts newspaper, the Springfield Argus, excoriated him, writing, ‘All the long years of servitude through which this [Scott] family has been doomed to labor has this hypocrite kept their ownership by his family from the public, while he had profited, not only by their labor, but by his extraordinary professions of love for the poor Negro.’ Newspapers across the country would carry similar denunciations.

After being forced by outraged public opinion to free (or urge his wife to free) Dred Scott, Dr. Chaffee did not run for reelection. The Chaffees transferred ownership of the Scotts to Taylor Blow, and he freed them shortly thereafter. Irene Chaffee later claimed to a newspaper reporter that she ‘was always in sympathy with the cause of the negro.’

Arba Crane drew up the legal papers that ultimately freed the Scotts. Their emancipation on May 26, 1857, made headlines throughout the nation.

Dred Scott found a job as a porter at Barnum’s Hotel in St. Louis, where guests regarded him as a celebrity. Following his death on September 17, 1858, he was buried in Wesleyan Cemetery. Harriet Scott outlived her husband by several years. She worked as a laundress in St. Louis and it is believed she died sometime around 1870.

In 1867 Taylor Blow moved Dred Scott’s grave to Calvary Cemetery. The grave was unmarked until 1957, but during that year, the 100th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision, its location was identified and a stone was placed on it.

Dred Scott died a free man. He had won his lawsuit after all.

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This article was written by Gregory J. Wallance and originally published in the March/April 2006 issue of Civil War Times Magazine.

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