Was Chief Justice Roger Taney reasonable in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)?

According to current legal opinion, the Dred Scott case was the Supreme Court’s worst. The Civil War was waiting in the wings. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it a “self-inflicted wound.” Chief Justice Warren E. Burger called it “the Great Mistake.” I write now with some trepidation, since my thesis is that it was a reasonable decision for the times, 1857; we expected too much from a Supreme Court decision with a conservative judicial methodology.

Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (herein Taney, pronounced "Tawney") said he could not solve the pressing political crisis: “It is not the province of the court to decide upon justice or injustice, the policy or impolicy of these laws. The decision of that question belonged to the political or law-making power; to those who formed the sovereignty and framed the Constitution. The duty of the court is, to interpret the instrument they have framed, with the best lights we can obtain on the subject, and to administer it as we find it, according to its true intent and meaning when it was adopted.” A careful reading of its 60 pages will show this original intent, textual language and precedent analysis; there is no policy, effect on society, value balancing or natural law analysis.

Dred Scott, the plaintiff, was a black slave who wanted his freedom for himself and his family. At the time of the case, his family was in Missouri, a slave state under the authority of their owner, Sandford (actually Sanford). They had been, however, in the Louisiana Territory in what is now Minnesota. It had been governed by the Congressional Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had determined that area to be free from slavery. They had also been in the free state of Illinois. Did their mere presence in those nonslave areas give them freedom? Importantly, a few years before 1857, in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act replaced the said Missouri Compromise.

A court needs to have jurisdiction to decide a case. Article III (2) of the Constitution gives “diversity jurisdiction” in federal court to citizens of different states. Sandford was a citizen of New York; Scott claimed to be a citizen of Missouri. The first issue of the case was, therefore: Can a slave, or an ancestor of a slave, be a citizen? The answer was no; they were not part of the “people” of the United States. They were not members of this sovereignty: “…they were 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 that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” Thus, Scott was not a citizen and, therefore, could not be a plaintiff in a federal court. Case dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.

The other issue in the case was whether Congress had the power to prohibit slavery north of a certain line in the Louisiana Territory pursuant to the Congressional Missouri Compromise of 1820? The answer was no, because it violated Article 5 of the Bill of Rights (the 5th Amendment) regarding property. Scott, as a slave, was property, and his owner had property rights that were not inferior to other property rights just because he was human, based on the wording, or textual language, of the Constitution. The Court held: “the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void…”

Taney will be forever remembered by his authorship of the Dred Scott decision. However, he had a sterling career on the court. We say we want our Supreme Court to interpret the law, not make it. We got that with Taney, for the Constitution and laws in 1857. Let’s not judge him by the Constitution and laws of 2022! Justice Samuel Miller wrote of Taney: “…after all that has been said of that great, good man, … conscience was his guide and sense of duty his principle.” (William Rehnquist, "The Supreme Court," 2001).

James W. Pfister, J.D. University of Toledo, Ph.D. University of Michigan (political science), retired after 46 years in the Political Science Department at Eastern Michigan University. He lives at Devils Lake and can be reached at jpfister@emich.edu.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: James Pfister: Was Chief Justice Roger Taney reasonable in Dred Scott?