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Dred Scott V. Sandford

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Dred Scott v. Sandford
The United States Supreme Court in March 1857 ruled that free blacks and black slaves were never citizens and would never gain citizenship in the United States. Additionally, the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney made a declaration that 1820 Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional thereby legalizing slavery countrywide. The Plaintiff Dred Scott had appealed to the Supreme Court to gain his freedom after living in the Free States of Illinois and Wisconsin before moving to the slave state of Missouri (Van and Maltz, p.144). The Judge Taney, who staunchly supported slavery, wrote that because Scott was black which nullified his citizenship had no right to sue in the federal courts. This ruling was in agreement with the Court's majority opinion. In his writing, he emphasized how the Negro belonged to the white man as of property, and the white man could reduce him to slavery as he wished (O'Connor, and Yanus, p.120). He further wrote that the black man had no protection from the Declaration of Independence that justifies all men to be equal because the intent of the Declaration of Independence was not to include the enslaved African race. Scott had sued in a state court in 1846 for his freedom because he had sojourned in a free state for a surmountable amount of time. In 1840, the state court made a declaration that Scott was free. Mr. Sanford appealed this decision to the Missouri Supreme Court (Cromwell, p.165). The case reached the Supreme Court after eleven years. The ruling of the Supreme Court was the worst in history.
The13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution overturned the decision of the Supreme Court. The two amendments abolished enslavement and declared all black people in the United States citizens of the United States. The case was the hallmark of the beginning of the civil war in

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