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After the Dred Scott decision, when Lincoln was inaugurated, in his first inaugural, he said, “if the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

In the infamous Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court Justice Taney, speaking for the majority, said that the Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.

Moreover, the Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott decision said Black people were not citizens of their states and could not become citizens even if they were living in a free state.

The most sweeping of the Reconstruction Amendments, the 14th Amendment overturned the Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans weren’t entitled to citizenship at birth.

The 14th Amendment was enacted as a direct response to the Supreme Court’s egregious 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that persons of African descent, such as enslaved people and formerly enslaved people, could not be considered citizens under the Constitution.