1857

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), the Supreme Court holds that blacks, including free blacks, cannot be citizens of the United States. Chief Justice Taney, arguing from the original intentions of the framers of the 1787 Constitution, states that blacks, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, were considered to be a subordinate and inferior class of beings, “with no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”