Dred Scott
Introduction
Dred Scott was an Africa
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Dred Scott was an African American (then "Negro") slave who was owned by Dr. Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army. In the course of his travels, Emerson took Scott from his home state of Missouri to military posts in Illinois and other parts of the former Louisiana Territory. At that time, Missouri was part of the former Louisiana Territory, which had been ceded to the United States by France under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase. In 1821, Missouri was separated out from the territory as its own state under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which maintained that slavery was thereby forbidden in all of the former Missouri Territory except for the newly-formed state of Missouri. Thus, in his travels, Emerson had taken Scott to states in which slavery was forbidden. After his return to Missouri, Scott sued Emerson claiming that his travels in the free states had made him a free man. Eventually, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Scott could not sue for his freedom because he could never be a U.S. citizen who would have access to the U.S. courts to bring such a lawsuit.Scott sued first in Missouri state court, relying on significant judicial precedent for his argument (Scott v. Emerson, 15 Mo. 576 (1852)). Prior to the Court's decision in Scott, there had been a long list of Missouri cases that held that a master lost property rights in his slaves when he took them into free territories. The most notable of these cases was
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in federal court (Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)). Sanford, into whose ownership Scott had fallen, replied that, as a Negro, Scott could not be a U.S. citizen and, therefore, could not maintain the lawsuit. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which understood the case to raise the question of whether Scott could be the citizen of a state. If he were such a citizen, then he could maintain the lawsuit because he would have standing as a citizen to sue another citizen in federal court. More than likely, most people today who read the Supreme Court's decision in Scott v. Sanford quickly notice the racism that informs the Court's reasoning regarding Scott's citizenship status. But the deep-seated nature of this racism at the time led the court to posit an argument that is internally inconsistent, but which produces the desired result. Essentially, the Court argued that Negroes could not be citizens because they were commercial property. However, it was left to the dissenters in the case, particularly Justice Curtis, to demonstrate that if commercial law properties were applied in the case, Scott would be a free man. The Supreme court began by distinguishing African slaves from Native Americans. Significantly, the C
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1815
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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