Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia around Dred grew up, probably in slave quarters, on the Blow property in Southampton County. In , when Dred Scott was a young man, he moved with the Blows, their six children, and several other slaves to a cotton plantation in Alabama.
For the next twelve years, Scott worked for the Blows. Two more children, sons Taylor and William, were born to the Blows in Alabama.
In , Scott moved again when the Blow family gave up farming and relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. Here they ran a boardinghouse called the Jefferson Hotel. Elizabeth Blow died in with Peter following in John Emerson, an assistant surgeon in the army stationed at Jefferson Barracks.
Scott became Dr. On December 1, , Dred Scott traveled with Dr. For the next three years, he lived and attended to Dr. When the fort was abandoned on May 4, , Dr. Scott traveled up the Mississippi River, even farther north. Major Taliaferro was known for respecting the rights of Native Americans. He may have sold or transferred ownership of Harriet Robinson to Dr. Emerson and married her to Dred Scott so the couple could remain together.
For the next year, Dred Scott remained at Fort Snelling with his bride. By April , however, he and Harriet—who was now pregnant—were sent south to Louisiana. Soon after making the long trip to Louisiana, the Scotts were sent to St. Louis, and then back to Fort Snelling. Harriet gave birth to their daughter Eliza Scott in free waters on the steamer Gipsey. Dred Scott remained at Fort Snelling for another two years, working for Dr.
Emerson and living with his wife and infant daughter. During the summer of , Harriet left Fort Snelling forever. Emerson had been transferred yet again, this time to Florida where the Seminole War was being fought. Harriet and her family were sent to St.
Louis where they were hired out to work for other people while the Emersons collected their wages. Harriet gave birth to another daughter, Lizzie Scott, during this period of time.
She most likely worked as a laundress and domestic servant. In , Dr. Emerson died suddenly. Emerson when they were wed. In the ensuing years, Dr. Emerson traveled to Illinois and the Wisconsin Territories, both of which prohibited slavery. When Emerson died in , Scott tried to buy freedom for himself and his family from Emerson's widow, but she refused. Scott made history by launching a legal battle to gain his freedom.
That he had lived with Dr. Emerson in free territories become the basis for his case. The process began in Scott lost in his initial suit in a local St. Louis district court, but he won in a second trial, only to have that decision overturned by the Missouri State Supreme Court. With support from local abolitionists, Scott filed another suit in federal court in , against John Sanford, the widow Emerson's brother and executor of his estate. When that case was decided in favor of Sanford, Scott turned to the U.
Supreme Court. In December , Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech, foreshadowing the Emancipation Proclamation of , examining the constitutional implications of the Dred Scott Case. Sandford was issued, 11 long years after the initial suits. Seven of the nine judges agreed with the outcome delivered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, who announced that slaves were not citizens of the United States and therefore had no rights to sue in Federal courts: " In an opinion filled with resentful language, the Missouri Supreme Court, by a vote of , reversed the judgment freeing the Scotts.
The court repudiated its rulings in the Winny v. Whitesides and Rachel v. But this persistent slave managed to find new lawyers to take up his cause. His adversary had also changed — Irene Emerson had remarried and left St. Louis after an ill-fated marriage to a much younger woman. Field filed a new suit in federal court on the basis of Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, commonly known as the diversity clause, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over suits between citizens of different states.
It was not a far-fetched theory because several Southern courts had recognized that the act of emancipation conferred at least some citizenship rights on a freed slave. Scott v. The lawsuit again asserted that Scott had been freed by his residence in Illinois and at Fort Snelling. The case was assigned to Judge Robert W. Wells, a Virginian who had been attorney general of Missouri. While Scott had convinced the court that it had the jurisdiction to hear his case, he still had to prove that his travels to Illinois and Fort Snelling had freed him under the law of Missouri.
The case went to trial in Judge Wells, though sympathetic to the Scotts, had no choice but to give a charge that reflected the ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court in Scott v. Emerson , since the federal case concerned solely a wrongful imprisonment charge and Scott had never proven unequivocally in any state case that he was declared free in Illinois. Sitting on that highest court were four slave state justices, four justices from free states and Roger Taney from Maryland, a border state that permitted slavery.
It is easy in hindsight to see why the Scott lawyers might have viewed Taney as a possible fifth vote in their favor. As a young lawyer, Taney had defended an abolitionist minister against charges of inciting slaves to rebellion. Taney had freed his own slaves and, after joining the Supreme Court, voted to free the slaves in the Amistad case.
In appearance he was frail and soft-spoken, to some resembling an old wizard, but his eyes shone with bright and piercing intelligence. The case was argued in the Supreme Court in and again in late , just as Americans began to debate slavery with more than words. On May 21, , border ruffians sacked the free-state town of Lawrence, Kan.
The Scott case also coincided with tragedy in the Taney family. In the summer that the case reached the Supreme Court, an outbreak of cholera was reported in Norfolk. Her mother died of a stroke the same day. Taney, then 78 years old, had begun writing his autobiography at Old Point Comfort. Taney was leaving Old Point, the scene of many happy summers and of one terrible tragedy, never to return, and the writing of the story of his life, which had begun there, was never to be resumed.
After the first argument, it was clear that Geyer and Johnson were defending nothing less than slavery itself. In challenging the authority of Congress to limit the expansion of slavery, the Sanford attorneys struck at the foundation of the legislative compromises that had saved the Union. Instead of issuing an opinion, the Supreme Court set the case down for another argument in December Following the second argument, the Supreme Court was initially divided.
Finally, a majority coalesced around a sweeping opinion. At the suggestion of Justice James M. Grier to join a majority opinion. Buchanan wrote to Justice Grier, who agreed to concur with the chief justice.
On March 6, , the Supreme Court was filled, and many were turned away. Taney then went on to issue a stunning ruling that attempted to end the slavery controversy forever.
That morning freedom had been national and slavery local. By the afternoon, it was the other way around. The country was a tinderbox, and now the Supreme Court had lit a match.
For the first time, Northern anger was not directed only at the expansion of slavery but at the South. Southerners warned that the opinion must be accepted by the North or there would be disunion. For two months Justice Taney refused to publish his opinion, and even ordered the Supreme Court clerk not to give a copy to dissenting Justice Curtis. Meanwhile, Taney was rewriting sections of his opinion to respond to the cascade of Northern anger that had descended on the Supreme Court.
That same year, on August 27 in Freeport, Ill. Douglas held the second of their famous debates, which were largely about the Dred Scott case. At its convention, the Democratic Party came apart over the Dred Scott decision. Seven of the nine justices agreed that Dred Scott should remain a slave, but Taney did not stop there.
He also ruled that as a slave, Dred Scott was not a citizen of the United States, and therefore had no right to bring suit in the federal courts on any matter. In addition, he declared that Scott had never been free, due to the fact that slaves were personal property; thus the Missouri Compromise of was unconstitutional, and the Federal Government had no right to prohibit slavery in the new territories. The court appeared to be sanctioning slavery under the terms of the Constitution itself, and saying that slavery could not be outlawed or restricted within the United States.
The American public reacted very strongly to the Dred Scott Decision. Antislavery groups feared that slavery would spread unchecked. The new Republican Party, founded in to prohibit the spread of slavery, renewed their fight to gain control of Congress and the courts.
Their well-planned political campaign of , coupled with divisive issues that split the Democratic Party, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States and South Carolina's secession from the Union. Ironically, Irene Emerson was remarried in to Calvin C. Chaffee, a northern congressman opposed to slavery.
After the Supreme Court decision, Mrs. Chaffee turned Dred and Harriet Scott and their two daughters over to Dred's old friends, the Blows, who gave the Scotts their freedom on May 26, On September 17, , Dred Scott died of tuberculosis and was buried in St. Louis at the old Weslyan Cemetery near the streets that are now Laclede and Grand. His grave was moved in the s to Calvary Cemetery in northern St.
His grave site at Calvary was marked due to the efforts of the Rev. Edward Dowling in of the Baden Historical Society. Dred Scott did not live to see the fratricidal war touched off at Fort Sumter in , but did live to gain his freedom. The ultimate result of the war, the end of slavery throughout the United States, was not something Dred Scott could have foreseen in , when he decided to sue for his freedom in St.
However, his life, his purpose and indeed his destiny was to be forever a most integral part of the destruction of an institution that when abolished, in large part because of the perseverance of Dred and Harriet Scott, freed not only a people but a nation from the grip of an unspeakable evil.
Post Mark cancellation stamp makes for an affordable and attractive gift. Own "our" history today. The Case The Dred Scott case was first brought to trial in on the first floor, west wing courtroom of St.
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