Black History Makers: Dred Scott

Get the Point!

Dred Scott was born enslaved in Virginia circa 1800 and in the year 1830, moved along with his then master, Peter Blow, first to Alabama, and then to St. Louis, Missouri.  In 1832, Blow died and Scott was sold to Dr. John Emerson, an Army officer who took him and his eventual wife, Harriett Scott, to Illinois and Wisconsin—both free states.  

Dred Scott

Scott's extended stays in Illinois and Wisconsin afforded him the opportunity to taste freedom although he was still legally bound to Dr. Emerson. When Dr. Emerson died in 1843, Scott sought to purchase freedom for himself and his wife, Harriett, for $300 from Mrs. Emerson. The new widow declined to free the Scotts.

Mrs. Emerson's refusal prompted Scott to sue on the grounds that he had previously lived for extended stays in free states; as Mrs. Emerson resided in Missouri, the case was brought in St. Louis and a circuit court judge ruled that the Scotts were, indeed, free.  The Missouri Supreme Court later overturned this ruling on grounds that the Scotts could not prove that Mrs. Emerson was their legal owner; Scott then sought redress in the U.S. District Court in St. Louis but was denied yet again—thus, setting up a dramatic showdown in the United States Supreme Court.

By the time Scott's case was granted review by the U.S. Supreme Court, seven of its nine justices had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents, including its Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney

Taney, in particular, hoped that the Supreme Court, through the Scott case, would decide once and for all the issue of slavery—one that had traversed a twisting legislative road dating as far back as the 1820 Missouri Compromise, and the later Fugitive Slave Act and Compromise of 1850, legal measures that separated pro-slavery and abolitionist camps into deeper (and more bitter) partisan divides.

On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Dred Scott was, in fact, still a slave and that he had no standing (legal rights) to sue in federal court as he was not a US citizen.  Chief Justice Taney's infamous opinion reasoned that the Founding Fathers "viewed all Blacks as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Two months after the Dred Scott ruling, the descendants of Peter Blow, Scott's first master, purchased his freedom—and he died a free man in 1858 from tuberculosis.  Slavery as a formal institution would die at the conclusion of a bloody Civil War the following decade.

Lest we forget...