1.  Foreign slave trade forbidden.

2.  Slave trade between the states allowed.

3.  Fugitive slaves to be returned.

4.  Whether a state should permit or abolish slavery to be determined by the state.

5.  Squatter sovereignty to be allowed in Kansas and Nebraska, Utah and New Mexico territories.

6.  The people in a territory to determine whether they would have a slave or a free state when they made a state constitution.

Now there were certain questions regarding slavery which were not settled, and one of them was this:  If a slave is taken by his master to a free state and lives there for a while, does he become free?

To this the Supreme Court gave the answer two days after Buchanan was inaugurated.  A slave by the name of Dred Scott had been taken by his master from the slave state of Missouri to the free state of Illinois, and then to the free soil of Minnesota, and then back to the state of Missouri, where Scott sued for his freedom, on the ground that his residence on free soil had made him a free man.  Two questions of vast importance were thus raised: 

1.  Could a negro whose ancestors had been sold as slaves become a citizen of one of the states in the Union?  For unless Dred Scott was a citizen of Missouri, where he then lived, he could not sue in the United States court.

2.  Did Congress have power to enact the Missouri Compromise?  For if it did not then the restriction of slavery north of 36 deg.30’ was illegal, and Dred Scott’s residence in Minnesota did not make him free.

From the lower courts the case came on appeal to the Supreme Court, which decided

1.  That Dred Scott was not a citizen, and therefore could not sue in the United States courts.  His residence in Minnesota had not made him free.

2.  That Congress could not shut slave property out of the territories any more than it could shut out a horse or a cow.

3.  That the piece of legislation known as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was null and void.  This confirmed all that had been gained for slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and opened to slavery Oregon and Washington, which were free territories.

%396.  Effect of the Dred Scott Decision.%—­Hundreds of thousands of copies of this famous decision were printed at once and scattered broadcast over the country as campaign documents.  The effect was to fill the Southern people with delight and make them more reckless than ever, to split the Democratic party in the North; to increase the number of Republicans in the North, and make them more determined than ever to stop the spread of slavery into the territories.

[Illustration:  %EXPANSION OF SLAVE SOIL IN THE UNITED STATES 1790-1860%]