QUESTION: I noticed that Dred Scott was decided in 1857, only three years before the Civil War broke out. I was wondering how the Court handled the events of the Civil War, as I assume some justices on the Court were Southerners. I noticed that while section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits Senators and Representatives who fought for the Confederacy from holding office, there is no mention of Justices. I am wondering if these issues ever came up, and if the southern Justices continued to serve after the Civil War. Per Dred Scott, I assume this precedent was invalidated by the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, as a constitutional amendment will trump a Supreme Court decision.
ANSWER: Good questions, all. Let me take them up in turn.
First, while most all representatives and Senators from the South resigned from their positions and left Washington for the home states once their home states seceded, I do not think this happened with any justices on the Court. My recollection is that they all stayed, regardless of their state of origin.
Second, and more broadly, the Court generally tried to stay out of the way during the Civil War. The Dred Scott decision, which tried to settle the great question of Congress's power to regulate slavery in the territories, and thus to avoid the war, was a miserable failure, and the Court's prestige was at a low ebb. Moreover, Lincoln flatly disobeyed Chief Justicve Taney's decision regarding the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in the Merryman case, which we discussed in class. The Court, regardless of the justices' views on slavery, secession, or the war, had little interest in exposing itself to further abuse.
Third, yes, the Fourteenth Amendment specifically overruled the Court's decision in Dred Scott. Section 1 (which has been in the news a bit recently) declares that any person born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. This specifically overruled the portion of Dred Scott stating that African Americans could not be citizens. Additionally, the Thirteenth Amendment prohibited slavery, whereas Dred Scott afforded great protection to the property interests of masters in their slaves as a matter of due process. These amendments clearly trump whatever the Court said previously in Dred Scott.