#ussc

Portrait of Dred Scott by Louis Schultze, commissioned by "a group of Negro citizens" and presented to the Missouri Historical Society in 1882. Supreme Court, Dred Scott case summary, 3/6/1857, NARA ID 301673.

Judgement: Dred Scott v. Sanford #OTD 1857

#OTD in 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that slaves and their descendants were not citizens – a decision decried by legal scholars as the worst ever rendered by the Court, one that later Chief Justice Evans Hughes called a “self-inflicted wound that almost destroyed the Supreme Court.”

By Miriam Kleiman, Public Affairs

This decision was overturned by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and declared all persons born in the United States to be citizens of the United States. This decision is one of the hundreds of thousands of Supreme Court case files at the National Archives, dating from 1792.

Will nobody speak for me at Washington, even without hope of other reward than the blessings of a poor black man and his family? Dred Scott, July 4, 1854

Background: In 1846 a slave named Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in a St. Louis city court. The odds were in their favor. They had lived with their owner, an army surgeon, at Fort Snelling, then in the free Territory of Wisconsin. The Scotts' freedom could be established on the grounds that they were held in bondage for extended periods in a free territory and were then returned to a slave state. Courts had ruled this way in the past. However, what appeared to be a straightforward lawsuit between two private parties became an 11-year legal struggle that culminated in one of the most notorious decisions ever issued by the United States Supreme Court.

I declare that the opinion of the chief justice in the case of Dred Scott was more thoroughly abominable than anything of the kind in the history of courts. Judicial baseness reached its lowest point on that occasion.” –Charles Sumner

Supreme Court Judgment , Dred Scott v. Sandford, 3/6/1857, NARA ID 301674. More online:

National Archives, African American History, Laws and Court Cases.

DocsTeach Lesson Plan: Judgment in the U.S. Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford

DocsTeach Lesson Plan: From Dred Scott to the Civil Rights Act of 1875: Eighteen Years of Change

A bit of November 13th history...

1789 - Benjamin Franklin writes “Nothing is certain but death and taxes”

1956 - US Supreme Court rules race separation on buses in Alabama is unconstitutional

2001 - War on Terrorism: In the 1st such act since WWII US President GW Bush signs an executive order allowing military tribunals against foreigners suspected of connections to terrorist acts or planned acts on the US

2017 - World’s earliest wine-making uncovered from Khramis Didi Gora, Georgia, in clay pots from 6000 BC

2017 - 1st Barbie doll to wear a hijab unveiled in NY; modeled on Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad (pictured)

Wow! Wow! That was Ruth-less! Now we know why she works out so much - so she can dance on your grave.

No. Never.