Freedom from Poverty and War, Republicanism and Equality, Voting Rights, Women and Slavery in the new U.S. Republic, or the meaning of the Dred Scott Case

FREEDOM
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Freedom
The Dred Scott v. Sandford case was a 10-years struggle for freedom by Dred Scott, a black slave. He belonged to Missouri’s John Emerson as a slave. The case moved via numerous courts before reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s ruling incensed abolitionists and provided direction to the anti-slavery movement and later offered a background to the Civil War.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the case on March 6, 1857, that slaves like Dred who had lived in Free states and territories where slavery was illegal lacked entitlement to freedom. This meant that African Americans could not have US citizenship and that the Missouri Compromise (1820) that made free territories at Missouri’s west, as well as north of latitude 36°30′, was not accepted constitutionally. The decision fueled the sectional controversies and pressed the nation towards civil war.
Justice Taney’s decision became the worst ever for wrongly providing a judicial decision on a political issue. Taney ignored precedent, did not consider the history and established a rigid and not flexible constitutional development. He did not consider unique provisions of authority and manipulated meanings out of not clear provisions. His citizenship logic was convoluted. This is because he declared that slaves may be citizens of a specific jurisdiction and can vote like in other states. However, he presented that state citizenship could not link to citizenship at the national level and that slaves could not seek legal measures in federal courts since they could not get US citizenship. This meant that Dred’s case should have been dismissed for lacking the district court’s jurisdiction. Justice Taney stood on shaky constitutional provisions that implied. This meant that if any state gave citizenship to black, the constitution would need all states and the federal government by inference...