Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Background: The Missouri
Compromise
• 1803: U.S. purchases
Louisiana Territory
from France
• 1820: Compromise
allows slavery in
Missouri, forbids
slavery in territory
north of latitude 36°30′,
and admits Maine as
free state
• 1821: Missouri
admitted as slave state
Dred Scott v. Sandford: Facts
• 1833: Dred Scott sold to Dr.
John Emerson in Missouri
• 1833-36: Emerson and Scott
reside in Illinois, a free state
• 1836-37: Emerson and Scott
reside in a free portion of the
Louisiana Territory (Wisconsin)
• 1843: Scott’s owner dies
Scott sued his master’s widow
for his freedom since he had
lived in a free state for a
lengthy period of time.
Court case went to the
Supreme Court for a decision
- Can a slave sue for his
freedom?
- Is a slave property?
- Is slavery legal?
The United States Supreme Court (Chief
Justice Roger B. Taney) ruled that all
people of African ancestry—slaves as well
as those who were free—could never
become citizens of the United States and
therefore could not sue in federal court. The
court also ruled that the federal government
did not have the power to prohibit slavery in
its territories because it deprived citizens of
their constitutional protection of their
property.
• The Supreme Court also ruled that Congress
could not stop slavery in the newly emerging
territories and declared the Missouri
Compromise of 1820 to be unconstitutional.
Lasting Effects
• Southerners thought it would crush the antislavery movement because slavery was now the
supreme law of the land
• Republican Party effectively used the court
decision as a propaganda tool
• The Republican party gained support and
momentum
• Lincoln elected president in next election – 1860
• South Carolina seceded from the Union, and the
Civil War promptly began
A major factor that Led to the Civil
War
Plessy v Ferguson (1896)
• After the end of the Civil War, the Black
codes of the 1860s, and later Jim Crow
laws, were intended to deny African
Americans of their newly won political
and social rights granted during
Reconstruction.
• Plessy was one of several Supreme
Court cases brought by African
Americans to protect their rights against
discrimination.
Background
• Activists in Louisiana were looking for a person to help them
challenge the Separate Car Act in Louisiana.
• The act made blacks ride in separate train cars from whites.
• They found a man who was 1/8 black named, Homer Plessy, who
could pass as a white man.
• On June 7, 1892 Homer Plessy would make a trip on the East
Louisiana Railroad.
• After buying his ticket and taking his seat he would tell the conductor
of his race and refusal to switch cars.
• The penalty for sitting in the wrong car was either 20 days in jail or a
$25 fine.
• He was then arrested and spent one night in jail and released in the
morning on bond.
Homer Plessy
Court Case
• Plessy argued that the acts violated his 13th and 14th
amendment rights.
• The judge was John Howard Ferguson, who had
recently declared that train cars traveling in more than
one state could not operate under the Separate Car Act.
• 13th Amendment- Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as
a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
• 14th Amendment- No State shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor
shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.
• Plessy appealed, claiming that he
had been denied equal protection
under the law. The Supreme Court
handed down its decision on May 18,
1896.
• Justice Henry Brown wrote:
That the Separate Car Act does not conflict with the
Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. A
statute which implies merely a legal distinction between
the white and colored races -- a distinction which is
founded in the color of the two races, and which must
always exist so long as white men are distinguished
from the other race by color -- has no tendency to
destroy the legal equality of the two races...The object
of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to
enforce the absolute equality of the two races before
the law, but in the nature of things it could not have
been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color,
or to enforce social equality, as distinguished from
political equality, or a commingling of the two races
upon terms unsatisfactory to either.
• The majority opinion of the Supreme Court
claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment
aimed to establish the equality of the
races, but was not intended to abolish
distinctions based on color or to enforce
social equality. Furthermore, they stated
the Louisiana law was ureasonable
because states could legally segregate the
races in the exercise of their police
powers.
• As a result, city and state governments
across the South, and in some other
states, maintained their segregation
laws for more than half of the 20th
century.
Jim Crow South
• It was not until 1954 in Brown v. Board
of Education that the Supreme Court
overturned Plessy.