While Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had hoped to settle issues related to slavery and Congressional authority by this decision, it aroused public outrage and deepened sectional tensions between the northern and southern U.S. states. President Abraham Lincoln 's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the post-Civil War Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments nullified the decision.
Overview
The case raised the issue of the status of enslaved individuals who had been held captive while residing in a free state. Such states and territories held that a slaveholder forfeited his property rights to his enslaved individuals in a state that prohibited the institution of slavery and where there was no law to support his controlling the slave. Congress had never before addressed whether slaves were free if they set foot upon free soil. The Dred Scott ruling overturned the Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional, holding that slavery was protected