How did Dred Scott win the US Supreme Court case?

He was a slave whose owner had taken him to live in a free state for a time, before they returned to slave country.

When his owner died, he was left, as property, to the dead man's family. Scott tried to sue for his freedom on the 'Once free, always free' principle, but was told he should have applied while he was living on free soil.

He appealed against this judgment, but the local judges had never dealt with this kind of application before, and it ended up in the Supreme Court.

This court, under the elderly Chief Justice, Roger Taney, delivered an astonishing verdict - that slavery was legal in every state of the Union, because the Founding Fathers had declared that a man's property (including his slaves) was sacred.

This divided the nation even more deeply, and brought war closer.