What is the Dred Scott case and its role in the civil war?

Answer 1

Dred Scott was the slave of an army doctor, who had spent most of his service near home in Alabama.

When the doctor was posted to the North, he took his slave with him. If Scott had applied for his freedom while on free soil, it would have been granted automatically. But he did not apply for it until after they had returned to slave-country and the doctor had died and left him as property in the will to his widow's family.

Scott then tried to apply for his freedom retrospectively on the grounds that he had lived for some years on free soil, and there was a tradition of "Once free, always free."

The local judges had never dealt with a case like this, and that is how it reached the Supreme Court, where the elderly Chief Justice ruled that the Constitution declared a man's property to be sacred, and that 'property' included slaves, as it would have done in the mind of the Founding Fathers.

This appeared to mean that slavery was legal in every state of the Union - a verdict that delighted the Southern slave-owners and traders as much as it outraged the Northern Abolitionists.

The Dred Scott case raised the temperature of the whole slave-debate, and brought civil war closer.