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Dred Scott (c. 1799 – 1858) was an enslaved African American who, along with his wife, Harriet Robinson Scott, unsuccessfully sued for the freedom of themselves and their two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, in the 1857 legal case Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Scotts claimed that they should be granted freedom because Dred had lived for four years in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal, and laws in those jurisdictions said that slave holders gave up their rights to slaves if they stayed for an extended period. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled against Scott in a landmark decision that held the Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and therefore they could not enjoy the rights and privileges that the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. The Dred Scott decision is widely considered the worst in the Supreme Court's history, being widely denounced for its overt racism, judicial activism, poor legal reasoning, and crucial role in the events that led to the American Civil War four years later. The ruling was later superseded by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery, in 1865, followed by the Fourteenth Amendment, whose first section guaranteed birthright citizenship for "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof", in 1868. This posthumous oil-on-canvas portrait of Scott was painted by Louis Schultze, after an 1857 photograph by John H. Fitzgibbon, and now hangs in the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis.Painting credit: Louis Schultze, after John H. Fitzgibbon

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