FRIDAY’s child is loving and giving…

Today is the anniversary of the 1857 decision of the Supreme Court – Dred Scott v. Sandford. It held that the United States Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and therefore they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens.

The decision involved the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved black man whose owners had taken him from Missouri, a slave-holding state, into Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal. When his owners later brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom and claimed that because he had been taken into “free” U.S. territory, he had automatically been freed and was legally no longer a slave.

In March 1857, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision against Scott. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Court ruled that people of African descent “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”.

Although Chief Justice Taney and several other justices hoped the decision would settle the slavery controversy, which was increasingly dividing the American public, the decision only exacerbated interstate tension. In 1865, after the Union‘s victory in the Civil War, the Court’s ruling in Dred Scott was superseded by passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery, and by Congress with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 conferring full citizenship and equal rights flowing from it. After Southern lawyers and courts countermanded this federal law with state law, Congress and 3/4 of the states in 1868 constitutionalized the 1866 Act by enacting the Fourteenth Amendment, whose first section guaranteed citizenship for “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”