(HOST) Commentator Peter Gilbert says that last Tuesday, March 6th, marked the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of one of the most well-known Supreme Court decisions in U.S. History. But the occasion was largely ignored, perhaps because the decision in the Dred Scott case was one of the worst ever issued by the Court.

(GILBERT) One hundred fifty years ago the Supreme Court met not in the imposing neo-Classical Supreme Court building we know today, built of gleaming white Vermont marble. The Court met instead in the Capital Building. It was there, downstairs, beneath the U.S. Senate, in the old Supreme Court Chamber, by the dim light of whale oil lamps, that the Court handed down perhaps the most infamous case in American history -- Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Dred Scott, a slave, had sued for his freedom. He argued that he became free when his owner brought him from Missouri, a "slave" state, for an extended stay in Illinois and Wisconsin, both "free" states.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a former slave owner from Maryland, wrote the Court's decision. Although the Court could have decided the case on narrow legal grounds, its decision was stunningly broad. It held that Scott was still a slave -- because a slave remained a slave even when he was taken into a state where slavery didn't exist. It said that blacks -- "free" or "slave" were not citizens under the Constitution and had no rights. And it declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, stating that Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery anywhere in the territories of the Louisiana Purchase. It was only the second time in history that the Court had declared a federal law unconstitutional. The Missouri Compromise was important because it maintained the balance in the Senate between "slave" and "free" states by admitting Maine as a "free" state and Missouri as a "slave" state. And it stipulated that the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri would be "free", and the territory to the south would be "slave".

Taney and pro-slavery politicians hoped that the decision would bring stability to the nation by resolving the question of slavery. Instead the case outraged the North and only hastened the coming of the Civil War. And it was so poorly reasoned and so apparently political that it left the Court, as present-day Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has said, covered with dishonor and deprived of legitimacy. The case has been called the Court's great self-inflicted wound.

The Court's perceived legitimacy is enormously important: the Court has no army and no power of the purse. Its power rests only in its perceived legitimacy, derived from its reasoned, rational, and impartial decisions. Its legitimacy is undermined when the Court --particularly a divided Court -- seeks to settle questions that are fundamentally political rather than legal questions. This is perhaps why the current Chief Justice, John Roberts, seems to be looking whenever possible for unanimity among the justices and wanting to decide cases on narrow grounds.

And what happened to Dred Scott the man? Shortly after the decision was handed down, he and his wife were purchased and set free. Unfortunately, however, he died of tuberculosis just nine months later having lived fifty-eight years a slave, and only nine months a free man.

Peter Gilbert is executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.