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The Dred Scott Case 20640 Views


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Who was Dred Scott? He was the former slave who took his case for freedom to the Supreme Court but sadly lost the case. (Although here's a bittersweet ending: although he was returned to slavery immediately after the case, he was freed a few years before his death.) The case brought new attention to the issue of slavery and even came to the attention of a certain fellow by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

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Transcript

00:08

The dreaded case of Dred Scott

00:13

No, this wasn't from Lindsay Lohan's wedding night. It was...

00:17

A runaway slave being arrested.

00:19

In 1846, when a slave's owner died.... the slave tried to purchase his freedom.

00:24

The slave's name was Dred Scott.

00:27

Who would name their kid Dred anyway? Dred's new owner wouldn't sell.

00:31

The Abolitionists -- people unified in trying to abolish slavery, hence the catchy title

00:35

-- backed Dred to sue for his rights to freedom.

00:39

They filed a lawsuit stating Dred had left

00:42

slave territory, gone into free man territory and should now legally be declared a free man.

00:49

The Dred Scott legal case turned the page

00:51

on one of the uglier chapters in American law.

00:54

Scott's original owner's family had moved from Missouri, a slave state,

00:58

to Illinois, a non slave state.

01:01

Then to Minnesota, a non slave state. Then he moved back to Missouri.

01:06

The case exploded onto the national scene.

01:09

The Abolitionists claimed that once Dred passed

01:11

into a non-slave state, he was freed. Their motto: "Once free, always free."

01:15

Taco Bell tried a similar motto recently, but sales plummeted.

01:19

Dred lost in the Missouri state ruling but won the right to have an appeal.

01:23

The case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court.

01:26

The press ate it up. National headlines. TMZ covered it too.

01:30

The Chief Justice at the time was Roger Taney. He owned slaves.

01:35

Andrew Jackson, also a slave-owner,

01:37

was the president and the guy who appointed him.

01:39

Taney's key legal focus: "States rights over Federal" -

01:43

that is, laws enacted by states should trump those enacted by the federal government when

01:49

there's a conflict. Taney wrote: "Slaves have no rights which

01:53

any white man was bound to respect."

01:55

In effect, Taney confirmed that slaves were property, not human.

02:00

Taney's ruling had more teeth than ruining one man's life:

02:03

It essentially overturned the Missouri Compromise:

02:06

Taney sort of perverted the human rights element of the law -

02:09

it wasn't about depriving the slave of his rights...

02:12

It was about depriving the slave owner of his rights in owning the slave.

02:17

That is, you can't just take away property because a slave steps one foot outside of paradise. 

02:24

The decision basically took away the right

02:26

to ever end slavery because if that happened, all the good white folk who had paid good

02:31

hard cash to buy their version of Dred would be deprived of property.

02:36

But a good thing did come from the case. The ruling helped a certain someone's famous Emancipation

02:41

Proclamation gain popularity years later. But it also was one of the pivotal points

02:46

turning the nation towards that would become the American Civil War.

02:51

Was the judge correct in that States rights should trump Federal law?

02:56

Would the Civil War have happened if the Dred Scott case turned out differently?

03:02

Shmoop amongst yourselves.

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