Lower courts largely refused to enforce Dred Scott’s citizenship holding

Evidence

In subsequent months, when lower federal courts and state courts alike were asked to enforce Taney’s conclusions, they balked and then sided with the views expressed by Justices McLean and Curtis. They set aside Taney’s brutal conclusion by parsing the language of his opinion, crafting exceptions to the general rule, and drawing a bright line between the authority of federal versus state judges to say who was a citizen. Despite its intent, Taney’s conclusion—that Black Americans were not citizens of the United States—went largely unenforced. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 721

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is a striking counterfactual the reader might chase: if Dred Scott was ‘largely unenforced’ by lower courts, how much did it actually do in practice versus as symbol? Does this undercut or complicate the standard narrative of the decision as an immediate catastrophe?
• XREF: Relevant to the case-study goal around contested empirical claims: the claim that Dred Scott went unenforced is a specific, falsifiable empirical claim separable from the reframing thesis.