In 1857 the US Supreme Court made one of its most controversial rulings — the Dred Scott decision. The circumstances of the life of the slave Dred Scott that led to his court case were complicated. Essentially, Scott was the slave of an army surgeon, Dr. John Emerson, who was on assignment in various free and slave states and territories to which he traveled with Scott. These free regions, such as the state of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory (in the area that is now Minnesota) had laws that allowed slaves who were brought into those areas to leave their masters to be free. The free states would not imprison them or return them to slavery.
Scott, however, did not claim freedom until his master died. Even then he attempted to buy his freedom from his master’s widow, which she refused. Scott then went to the St. Louis Circuit Court in 1846 and petitioned for his freedom. By the law of the state of Louisiana where Emerson’s widow resided, his estate was transferred to the her brother, John F. A. Sanford. Scott lost his case against Sanford in St. Louis, but abolitionist groups and sympathizers helped him pursue the case through the appeals process for more than ten years, all the way to the Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had hoped that a definitive decision on the status of slaves passing through free and slave states would settle the matter once and for all. But the court ruled that the status of a slave as property mattered more than the laws of the free states. His Dred Scott decision, in effect, decreed that Congress had no say in the matter. With one stroke of the pen, the court nullified the Missouri Compromise and all other efforts to create two jurisdictions — one free and one slave — in the US.
Rather than settle tensions, the decision rekindled the fires of sectional hostilities that were already burning bright. Political relationships were disrupted, and more and more politicians from the North and South felt that the decision hastened the day when the US was either going to be, as future president Abraham Lincoln would say, "all free or all slave." The presidential election of 1860 was the place where the question of the future of slavery was being played out. In this cartoon, "The Political Quadrille. Music by Dred Scott," the cartoonist is making satire out of the dilemmas that each of the presidential candidates faced as they jockeyed for a winning political position in the wake of the Dred Scott decision.