Most school students learn, or at least used to learn, that opposition to slavery mushroomed in the northern states with the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857, but the details surrounding that infamous ruling are often less well known.
The details are very interesting however, and David Hackett Fischer recounts them, and the stories of many other slaves in the antebellum years, in his magisterial work African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of this "peculiar institution."
Fischer tells us that Dred (short for Etheldred) Scott was born a slave in Southampton Co. Virginia in 1799. His owner, a man named Ben Blow, moved his slaves first to Huntsville, Alabama and then to St. Louis, Missouri in 1830.
There Scott was sold to an army surgeon named John Emerson who took him to free states and territories where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
In 1837 Scott was living in free Wisconsin territory near what is today Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he met another Virginia slave named Harriet Robinson. The two decided to marry and they were joined in a formal matrimonial service by Harriet's master, a justice of the peace named, Lawrence Taliaferro. The formal service was permitted only to free people. Taliaferro then sold Harriet to John Emerson so that the couple could live together.
Emerson was subsequently ordered to southern military posts, but he left Dred and Harriet in the north where they were leased as servants to other officers. They lived in virtual freedom and the first of their four children was born in free territory.
In 1837 the Scotts returned to Missouri, a slave state. Dred was hired out to numerous people but continued to live in virtual freedom while his new owner, the widow of John Emerson, continued to hire him out as a source of income for herself.
While working for a law firm he learned that, under Missouri's judicial principle of "once free, always free," slaves who lived in free territory became free themselves, so Dred and Harriet sued for their freedom.
In 1848 a Missouri court nevertheless ruled against them, so they began a series of appeals in 1850, all of which they lost. Even so, with the help of people who knew them, including members of Ben Blow's family, the case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court.
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| Dred and Harriet Scott |
The case was heard by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Fischer writes:
[Taney was] an odd character, a Maryland Federalist who had become a Jacksonian Democrat. He was also a Maryland planter who had freed his own slaves in early life, but became a strong defender of slavery as an institution. On March 6, 1857 a majority of the court rejected Scott's suit.The Scotts lost the case, but were manumitted by their owners anyway. Unfortunately, Dred didn't live to see the consequence of his perseverance, dying in 1858 of tuberculosis.
Chief Justice Taney went further. He asserted that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 could not extend freedom or citizenship to any person of color. And the court ruled that the Missouri Compromise ...was unconstitutional in excluding slavery, depriving masters of their property, and extending freedom and citizenship to people of African ancestry....
Further, Taney and other justices added obiter dicta that went far beyond the case itself.They ruled that no slave or descendant of a slave could ever be free, or become a citizen, or bring a freedom suit in any court of the United States; that Congress could never abolish slavery anywhere; and that no federal or state court could deprive an owner of his property in a slave.
The ruling seemed at first to be a great victory for southern slave owners, but it proved their undoing. Many northerners who were indifferent to the cause of abolition were outraged by the case, and as a result, slave owners and their northern allies lost control of Congress in 1858.
They then lost the presidency in 1860, and ultimately were devastated by a civil war that produced emancipation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which abolished slavery throughout the United States and affirmed the rights of citizenship without limits of race, ethnicity, or previous condition of bondage.
Doubtless, abolition would've happened eventually, but it was accelerated by the determination of Dred and Harriet Scott and the foolish bigotry of Roger Taney.
