In 1846, Dred Scott and his wife Harriet filed suit for their freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court. This suit began an eleven-year legal fight that ended in the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued a landmark decision declaring that Scott remain a slave. This decision contributed to rising tensions between the free and slave states just before the American Civil War. The records displayed in this ...

USA-project, Essay-area, impact of Dred Scott decision ...

The Dred Scott Decision Dred Scott was the name of an African-American slave. He was taken by his master, an officer in the U.S. Army, from the slave state of Missouri to the free state of Illinois and then to the free territory of Wisconsin. He lived on free soil for a long period of time. When the Army ordered his master to go back to Missouri, he took Scott with him back to that slave state, ...

Dred Scott: Introduction Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man's nature--opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. (Abraham Lincoln) During the 1850's in the United States, Southern support of slavery and ...

Compete text of the Supreme Court decision, and all concurring and dissenting opinions.

Return to Documents 60 U.S. 393, 19 How. 393, 15 L.Ed. 691 DRED SCOTT, PLAINTIFF IN ERROR, v. JOHN F. A. SANDFORD. December Term, 1856 MR. CHIEF JUSTICE TANEY: This case has been twice argued. After the argument at the last term, differences of opinion were found to exist among the members of the court; and as the questions in controversy are of the highest importance, and the court was at that ...