Dred Scott

Dred Scott was born into slavery around 1799 in Southampton County, Virginia. The exact date of his birth was never recorded, a common fate for people held as property, and even his original name is uncertain: some accounts suggest he was called Sam in his youth ^[1]. His first enslaver was Peter Blow, a Virginia farmer whose fortunes pushed the household steadily westward.

The Blow family left Virginia and settled for a time in Huntsville, Alabama, where Peter Blow tried farming with limited success. By 1830 the family had moved again, this time to St. Louis, Missouri, a fast-growing river city where they operated a boarding house ^[2]. Scott, then in his early thirties, came with them.

Peter Blow died in 1832, and within a few years Scott was sold to Dr. John Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army. That sale, an ordinary transaction by the brutal standards of the time, set in motion the travels that would later form the heart of the most famous freedom suit in American law ^[1]. The Blow children, notably Taylor Blow, would remain connected to Scott's life for decades, eventually helping to fund his court battles.

Army postings carried Emerson, and with him Scott, far beyond the slave states. In 1833 Emerson was assigned to Fort Armstrong in Illinois, a state whose constitution prohibited slavery. Around 1836 he was transferred to Fort Snelling, near present-day St. Paul, in the Wisconsin Territory, where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had banned slavery outright ^[3]. Scott spent several years living and working in places where, on paper, no person could legally be held as a slave.

At Fort Snelling, Scott met Harriet Robinson, an enslaved teenager held by the Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro. The two married in a civil ceremony around 1836 or 1837, an unusual formality for enslaved people, and Taliaferro transferred Harriet to Emerson so the couple could stay together ^[4]. Their first daughter, Eliza, was born a few years later aboard a steamboat on the Mississippi River, north of the Missouri state line and therefore in free territory. A second daughter, Lizzie, followed later in St. Louis.

Emerson's postings continued to shift. He moved to Louisiana, married Eliza Irene Sanford in 1838, and summoned the Scotts to join him, then returned with them to St. Louis and Fort Snelling before further transfers. When Emerson died in Iowa Territory in 1843, ownership of the Scott family passed to his widow, Irene Emerson, who hired them out to other households in St. Louis for wages she collected herself ^[3].

On April 6, 1846, Dred and Harriet Scott each filed petitions in the St. Louis Circuit Court seeking their freedom. Missouri courts had long recognized a doctrine summarized as once free, always free: an enslaved person who had resided on free soil with an enslaver's consent was entitled to liberty, and dozens of plaintiffs had won on exactly that theory ^[5]. Given the years at Fort Armstrong and Fort Snelling, the Scotts' claim looked strong. Members of the Blow family, the children of Scott's first enslaver, helped pay legal costs, and Harriet's case was folded into her husband's so that a single verdict would govern the whole family.

The first trial, in 1847, collapsed on a technicality: the Scotts could not properly prove that Irene Emerson actually held them, because a key witness's testimony was ruled hearsay. A retrial was granted, and in January 1850 a St. Louis jury found for the Scotts. For a brief period, Dred Scott was legally a free man ^[5].

Irene Emerson appealed, and in 1852 the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the verdict by a vote of two to one. Writing amid rising national tension over slavery, the majority openly abandoned decades of Missouri precedent, declaring that times had changed and that the state would no longer enforce the laws of free jurisdictions ^[6]. The Scotts were returned to bondage. Their lawyers then opened a new front, filing suit in federal court against John F. A. Sanford, Irene's brother, a New York businessman who acted for her interests (a clerk's misspelling fixed the case name as Sandford). The federal case was decided against Scott in 1854, and his attorneys appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The case of Dred Scott v. Sandford was argued twice before the Supreme Court and decided on March 6, 1857, two days after James Buchanan's inauguration. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the opinion for a seven to two majority, and its reach went far beyond one family's freedom. Taney held that people of African descent, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States and therefore had no right to sue in federal court ^[7]. He went further, ruling that Congress had no constitutional power to bar slavery from the territories, which rendered the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. It was only the second time the Court had struck down a federal statute.

The decision detonated across the political landscape. Southern leaders celebrated it as vindication, while Northern newspapers, clergy, and politicians denounced it as a corruption of the Constitution. Justices John McLean and Benjamin Curtis wrote forceful dissents, and Curtis resigned from the Court within months ^[7]. Abraham Lincoln attacked the ruling repeatedly during his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, and historians generally count the case among the immediate causes of the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, overturned its citizenship holding by declaring that all persons born in the United States are citizens ^[8].

For Scott himself, the loss was total in law but short-lived in fact. Irene Emerson had remarried; her new husband, Calvin Chaffee, was a Massachusetts congressman opposed to slavery, and the revelation that his wife held the most famous enslaved man in America proved deeply embarrassing. The family arranged to transfer the Scotts to Taylor Blow of St. Louis, who formally emancipated Dred, Harriet, Eliza, and Lizzie on May 26, 1857 ^[2].

Freedom, when it finally arrived, gave Scott just under sixteen months of life as a free man. He took work as a porter at Barnum's Hotel in St. Louis, where travelers sometimes sought him out, curious to see the plaintiff whose name filled the newspapers ^[2]. Harriet took in laundry, and the family lived quietly in the city where their long legal struggle had begun.

Accounts from those who met him in these months describe a small, unassuming man in his late fifties who bore his fame with patience. He gave few public statements, though he reportedly found the national attention a strange burden after so many years of anonymity ^[1].

Dred Scott died of tuberculosis in St. Louis on September 17, 1858. Taylor Blow paid for his burial. His remains were later moved to Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, where his grave became a site of remembrance; visitors still leave Lincoln pennies on the headstone ^[9]. Harriet Scott outlived her husband by many years, dying in 1876, and their daughters lived to see slavery abolished.

Any honest account of Dred Scott achievements must begin with a paradox: he lost his case, yet the loss reshaped American history. The decision that bears his name discredited the Supreme Court in the eyes of much of the North, hardened antislavery politics, propelled the new Republican Party, and helped make the Civil War, in the judgment of many historians, all but unavoidable ^[10]. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, ratified in 1865 and 1868, buried its holdings, and legal scholars now routinely rank Taney's opinion as the worst decision the Court has ever issued.

Scott's persistence carries its own weight in the record of Dred Scott facts. He and Harriet pursued freedom through eleven years of petitions, trials, reversals, and appeals, sustained by allies both Black and white, at a time when the odds against an enslaved plaintiff were immense. Historians such as Don E. Fehrenbacher and Lea VanderVelde have shown that the suit was a family effort, with Harriet's determination to protect her daughters at its core ^[4].

St. Louis has embraced his memory. The Old Courthouse, where the original trials took place, is preserved within Gateway Arch National Park, and a bronze statue of Dred and Harriet Scott stands outside it ^[9]. Descendants established the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation to promote education and reconciliation. Every serious Dred Scott biography returns to the same conclusion: a man who was denied standing in court now occupies permanent standing in the nation's conscience.