The Imaginative Conservative (February 13, 2025): With his bold pronouncement in the Dred Scott decision that Congress had no jurisdiction over the territories, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney hoped to preempt all political discussion and debate. But he was sadly disappointed, for his majority opinion itself became the focus of a new, and ever more vicious, round of political battles as the presidential election of 1860 approached.
I. The Historical Background
On March 6, 1857, two days after James Buchanan took the oath of office as president of the United States, the Supreme court announced its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. John F.A. San[d]ford.[i]The case was complex and the decision long in coming. In 1834, an army surgeon named John Emerson reported for duty at Rock Island, Illinois.With him was Dred Scott, a slave whom he had recently purchased in St. Louis. Emerson kept Scott with him at Fort Armstrong for two years, despite an Illinois state law forbidding slavery. In 1836, the army posted Dr. Emerson to Fort Snelling, located in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, in what was then Wisconsin territory and which subsequently became the state of Minnesota. As before, he took his slave Dred Scott with him, although the Missouri Compromise explicitly prohibited slavery north of latitude 36° 30’. While stationed at Fort Snelling, Emerson bought a slave woman named Harriet, who eventually married Dred Scott, although the law did not sanction slave marriages. After several years, the army again transferred Emerson, whose slaves returned with him to Missouri.[ii]
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III. Consequences & Significance
Not since Marbury v. Madison in 1803 had the Supreme Court employed the principle of judicial review to overturn congressional legislation. The court’s ruling that neither Congress nor the territorial governments could ban slavery, in effect, renounced both the Missouri Compromise and popular sovereignty. Taney had made it clear to Republicans that even should they win control of the national government they could not execute their pledge to keep the territories free of slavery. Slavery could only be proscribed after a territory became a state. By then it might be too well entrenched to remove. It appeared both to the opponents of slavery and to the advocates of free soil that Taney and a majority of the Supreme Court were parties to a vast conspiracy among slaveholders to take over the government.