What if the USSC ruled that Scott was free but only because he spent time in a Free STATE not a Free Territory. That is congress had no power to restrict slavery in the territories but states could do anything they wanted as regards to slavery.
What if the USSC ruled that Scott was free but only because he spent time in a Free STATE not a Free Territory. That is congress had no power to restrict slavery in the territories but states could do anything they wanted as regards to slavery.
The problem is that to decide that Scott's temporary residence in Illinois made him free they would have had to overrule *Strader v. Graham,* 51 U.S. 82 (1850). " Every state has an undoubted right to determine the status, or domestic and social condition of the persons domiciled within its territory except insofar as the powers of the states in this respect are restrained, or duties and obligations imposed upon them, by the Constitution of the United States. There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that can in any degree control the law of Kentucky upon this subject. And the condition of the negroes, therefore, as to freedom or slavery after their return depended altogether upon the laws of that state, and could not be influenced by the laws of Ohio. It was exclusively in the power of Kentucky to determine for itself whether their employment in another state should or should not make them free on their return."
http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/51/82/case.html
In other words, you are proposing that the Court overrule its past decisions--and do so in an anti-slavery direction--while simultaneously veering in a pro-slavery direction by saying (unnecessarily) that Congress could not exclude slavery from the territories. (Surely if the Court was anti-slavery enough to overrule *Strader* it would make more sense for it to say "we need not reach the issue of Congress' power over the territories since his residence in Illinois made him free.")