The Dred Scott decision validated Southern views of slavery in several key ways:

• The Supreme Court ruled that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, were not and could never be citizens of the United States, and therefore had no legal standing to sue in federal court. This denied black people any constitutional protections, aligning with the Southern belief that blacks were property, not citizens

• The Court declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the federal territories. This effectively opened all western territories to slavery, supporting the Southern position that slavery should be allowed to expand and that the federal government could not restrict it

• Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's majority opinion explicitly stated that the framers of the Constitution did not intend for African Americans to be included as part of "the people" who framed the Declaration of Independence, justifying slavery as lawful and consistent with the founders' intent. This legal reasoning reinforced Southern claims that slavery was protected by the Constitution

• The decision endorsed states' rights and property rights of slaveholders, rejecting the idea that residence in a free state or territory automatically freed a slave. This validated Southern legal and social norms that slaves remained property regardless of their location

• Southern newspapers and politicians celebrated the ruling as making their pro-slavery views "the supreme law of the land," seeing it as a judicial endorsement of their social and economic system

Overall, the Dred Scott decision gave the Southern slaveholding states a powerful legal affirmation that slavery was constitutionally protected and could not be restricted by the federal government, thus validating their views and escalating sectional tensions that contributed to the Civil War