Question

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING BEST EXPLAINS THE DREAD SCOTT CASE AND HOW IT AFFECTED THE DEBATE ABOUT SLAVERY

Answer 1

You didn't list the following which makes this difficult but maybe I can still help...

In the Dred Scott case, a slave tried to sue for his freedom because his owner brought him into a free state, and he believed that this made him free. The eventual ruling was that since slaves weren't citizens, they couldn't even sue at all. In fact, they ruled that all African Americans, slaves or free, weren't real citizens. This was a huge blow for the antislavery movement, because it basically stated that slaves were so inferior that they could never hope to become citizens, and made things much worse for free slaves. The ruling also included that the federal government did not have the power to ban slavery in the states, and that the states could do whatever they pleased about it. This made it much easier for slavery to continue until the ruling was overruled later on.

Hope I helped!

Answer 2

Elly has a good summary, but there are some subtleties that may be of interest.

First, Taney (the Chief Justice who wrote the decision in Scott v. Sanford) said that Scott, and likewise any other person of African descent who had not legally immigrated to, but rather been brought as property (as a slave) to the United States was not a citizen of the United States according to the Constitution. He also said that any descendant of such a pesron was also not a citizen of the United States, again according to the Constitution. And that's the reason Scott and no one else in his situation could sue in Federal Court.

There are a few important things he did not say: he did not say Scott was not, or coud not, be a citizen of any given state, and therefore could not sue in state court. That, he said, was up to the states, and they could do as they please. Hence, South Carolina could say that Scott was not a citizen, but property, while Massachusetts could say he was a free citizen and entitled to vote and sue in state court.

He also did not say it was a just or sensible idea that Scott was not a citizen of the United States. He just said that, like it or not, the Constitution did not make him one, and the Supreme Court had no power to overrule the Constitution. (This reasoning, by the way, was so far accepted even after the Civil War that it was believed necessary to amend the Constitution to give citizenship to free black by establishig the principle that any person born in the United States was by that fact alone a citizen of both the state in which he was born, and of the United States -- without regard to how he came to be here. This is the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868.)

What Taney was trying to do was dodge the bullet, and force the decision of what to do about slavery and even about free blacks back to the sovereign people. He was, in essence, saying that the Supreme Court was not going to decide these enormous momentous questions of (1) was it legal to enslave anyone? (2) was it moral? (3) if it was not moral, or not legal, who should intervene? Taney said those decisions must be made by each state, or by Congress, or in some other way by the people themselves. He and his associates on the Supreme Court were not going to make it for them. And, furthermore, the existing decision of the people, as reflected by history and the Constitution, was that black slaves and former slaves were NOT citizens -- and the Supreme Court was not going to overrule that.

Taney was actually trying to solve the strife over slavery by saying these questions could only be solved politically -- by some giant decision by the people themselves, as might be (and eventually was) reflected, in a Constitutional Amendment (not to mention a Civil War!) He was trying to stop both sides (pro- and anti-slavery) from angling for a hold on the Federal Government so as to use the power of the Federal Government to force its views on everyone else. That is, he saw a struggle for control of government in order to solve social problems as worse than the problems themselves, and sought to firmly put solution of the problem back into the hands of the people, and out of the legal or ethical jurisdiction of the Court.

Taney is widely considered to have been dead wrong about this, and his decision to have hastened the Civil War, rather than (as he hoped) lessen the bitterness and danger of the conflict. But this is a matter of unproven (and generally unprovable) opinion. We don't know what would have happened if the Supreme Court had ruled the other way -- had said that, willy nilly, slaves and those born of slaves were citizens of the United States, and could sue for their freedom. It is entirely possible that would have been seen by the Southern states as no less of an act of outrage than anything they feared with the election of Lincoln, and would have led directly to secession in 1857 instead of 1861.

Futhermore, secession in 1857 and in response to what would have been seen (even by Northern states) as a great big increase in the degree to which the Supreme Court said it, and the Federal Government generally, could interfere with the business of the states, might well have stuck. There were many in the North who were sympathetic not to slavery, but to the rights of the Southern states to order their society as they saw fit, and not be subject to interference by other states that saw things differently. After all, people in Illinois sure didn't want those in Texas or Alabama telling them how to live, so they figured they owed the same privilege to citizens of Texas and Alabama. It's sort of like the argument, which you often (ironically) see on the left today, which says the United States has no business telling, say, the government of Afghanistan that women should not be required to cover their heads, or be allowed to divorce, or telling the government of Iran that their citizens should be allowed to convert to Catholicism.

So if Soutthern states seceeded in 1857 in response to what they would call a crazy power-grab by the Supreme Court, it's possible the Northern states would not have been nearly as willing to drag them back by armed force. (We can also keep in mind President Buchanan was a weak leader, sympathetic to the South anyway, and would certainly not have pressed the case for Union the way Lincoln did.) So secession might have stuck, and we'd have a Confederate States of America -- and slaves -- to this very day. That would arguably be worse than what did happen: the Civil War.