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The Dred Scott Case 20640 Views
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Description:
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.
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.
Full Transcript
- 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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