During the 1850's in the United States, Southern support of slavery and Northern opposition to it collided more violently than ever before over the case of Dred Scott, a black slave from Missouri who claimed his freedom on the basis of seven years of residence in a free state and a free territory. When the predominately proslavery Supreme Court of the United States heard Scott's case and declared that not only was he still a slave but that the main law guaranteeing that slavery would not enter the new midwestern territories of the United States was unconstitutional, it sent America into convulsions. The turmoil would end only after a long and bloody civil war in which an important issue was the question of slavery and its extension into America's unorganized territories. The Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford helped hasten the arrival of the American Civil War, primarily by further polarizing the already tense relations between Northerners and Southerners.

Scott's beginnings were quite humble. Born somewhere in Virginia, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, with his owners in 1830 and was sold to Dr. John Emerson sometime between 1831 and 1833. Emerson, as an Army doctor, was a frequent traveler, so between his sale to Emerson and Emerson's death in late 1843, Scott lived for extended periods of time in Fort Armstrong, Illinois, Fort Snelling, Wisconsin Territory, Fort Jessup, Louisiana, and in St. Louis. During his travels, Scott lived for a total of seven years in areas closed to slavery; Illinois was a free state and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had closed the Wisconsin Territory to slavery. When Scott's decade-long fight for freedom began on April 6, 1846, he lived in St. Louis and was the property of Emerson's wife.

The famous Scott v. Sandford case, like its plaintiff, had relatively insignificant origins. Scott filed a declaration on April 6, 1846, stating that on April 4, Mrs. Emerson had "beat, bruised, and ill-treated him" before imprisoning him for twelve hours. Scott also declared that he was free by virtue of his residence at Fort Armstrong and Fort Snelling. He had strong legal backing for this declaration; the Supreme Court of Missouri had freed many slaves who had traveled with their masters in free states. In the Missouri Supreme Court's 1836 Rachel v. Walker ruling, it decided that Rachel, a slave taken to Fort Snelling and to Prairie du Chien in Illinois, was free. Despite these precedents, Mrs. Emerson won the first Scott v. Emerson trial by slipping through a technical loophole; Scott took the second trial by closing the loophole. In 1850, the case reached the Missouri Supreme Court, the same court that had freed Rachel just fourteen years earlier. Unfortunately for Scott, the intervening fourteen years had been important ones in terms of sectional conflict. The precedents in his favor were the work of "liberal-minded judges who were predisposed to favor freedom and whose opinions seemed to reflect the older view of enlightened southerners that slavery was, at best, a necessary evil." By the early 1850's, however, sectional conflict had arisen again and uglier than ever, and most Missourians did not encourage the freeing of slaves. Even judicially Scott was at a disadvantage; the United States Supreme Court's Strader v. Graham decision (1851) set some precedents that were unfavorable to Scott, and two of the three justices who made the final decision in Scott's appearance before the Missouri Supreme Court were proslavery. As would be expected, they ruled against Scott im 1852, with the third judge dissenting. Scott's next step was to take his case out of the state judicial system and into the federal judicial system by bringing it to the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Missouri.

When the Court met for the first time since the reargument to discuss the case on February 12, 1857, it favored a moderate decision that ruled in favor of Sanford but did not consider the larger issues of Negro citizenship and the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise. The majority chose Justice Nelson as the writer of a decision that avoided these importatn but highly contoryersial issues, and Nelson went to work on it. When Nelson presented his opinion to the majority, however, he discovered that his majority opinion turned out to be the opinion of only himself. the Court elected to throw out Nelson's decision and instead chosse Chief Justice Roger B. Taney as teh writer of the true majority opinion for the court, an opinion that would include everything under consideration in the case, including Nergo citizenship an the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise.

By mid-February 1857, many wewll-informed Americans were aware that the conclusion of the Scott vs. Sanford case was close at hand. President-elect James Buchanan contacte some of his friends on the Supreme Court starting in early February; he aske dif the Court had reached a decision in the case, for he needed to know what he should say about the territorial issue in his inaugural address. on March 4. By inaugration day 1857, Buchanan knew what the outcome of the Supreme Court's decision would be and took the opportunity to throw his support to the Court in his inaugural address.

One of the privileges reserved for citizens bt the Constitution, argued taney, was the priviledge of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified by the Constitution. Taney's opinion stated that Negro'swere not citizens of the United States, and that therefore Scott did even have the the priviledgeo being able to sue in a federal court. Taney then turned to the question of the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromisse. The territories acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Taney stated, were dependent upon the national government, and the government, and tjhe government could not act outside its framework as set forth in the Constitution.

The Constitution made no distinction between slaves and other types of property. Taney reasoned that the Missouri Compromise deprived slaveholding citizens of their property in the form of slaves and that therefore the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. Scott's case had one last hope: the Chief Justice could decide that Scott was free because of his stay in the free state of Illinois. Taney made no such decision, instead stating that "The status of slaves who had been taken to free states or territories and who had afterwards returned depended on the law of the State where they resided when they brought the suit." Scott had brought the suit In Missouri and hence he was still a slave because Missouri was a slave state. Taney dismissed for alck of jurisdiction and sent back to the lower court with instrustions for that court to dismiss the case for the same reason, therefore upholding the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling in favor of Sanford.