The United States of America has never been without divisive and
contentious political issues that that threatened to tear the nation
apart. By 1857, the abolition vs. slavery debate was exactly that.
Northern Abolitionists were ramping up their attacks on slave-holders
and the southerners were pressuring the government to permanently
make slavery a legal institution. As America expanded into the
territories further west, the debate became more heated since both
northerners and southerners wanted to claim them as their own. The
Missouri Compromise allowed that states below the 40th
parallel were allowed to be slave states and those above that line
were not, with the exception of Missouri where slavery was legal but
some African-Americans were also allowed to be free. Missouri is
where the Dred Scott vs. Sandford case started and escalated all the
way up to the Supreme Court. To this day, the judgment in that case
is considered to be one of the biggest legal disasters in the history
of the USA.
The man named Dred Scott was born a slave in 1795 in Virginia.
His owner, plantation manager Peter Blow, moved to Alabama and
brought Scott with him. Later he moved to St. Louis and decided to
give up farming so he sold his slaves and the ownership of Dred Scott
was transferred to a doctor named John Emerson. Dred Scott’s legal
status as a slave became complicated when Emerson moved to Illinois
while retaining ownership of him. Slavery was illegal in Illinois.
They later went on to Wisconsin, then part of Minnesota, yet another
state where slavery was illegal. While there, Dred Scott married a
woman named Harriet Robinson, complicating his legal status ever
further since slave marriages were not recognized by law in slave
states. The married couple went on to have a daughter. Emerson, being
an army doctor, was ordered back to St. Louis so he brought Dred
Scott and Harriet Robinson with him. During the journey by steamboat
down the Mississippi River, Ms. Robinson gave birth to their
daughter, Eliza; she was born while they were still traveling in the
northern territories so technically she was a free citizen. Emerson
was then reassigned to a post in Louisiana so the Scott family again
were taken along. Under Louisiana law, Harriet Robinson and Eliza
were slaves simply because they were African-American and were
thereby considered Emerson’s property. Dred Scott’s marriage was
considered null and void since slave marriages were not recognized in
southern courts.
Dr. Emerson was further transferred to another state, this time
to Florida to serve in the Seminole War. He gave Dred Scott and his
family over to his wife Irene in St. Louis where she hired them out
for her own financial gain. Emerson died and Irene inherited the
estate which included the Dred Scott family as part of the
possessions. She continued to rent them out but Dred Scott was tired
of slavery; after having tasted freedom in Illinois and Wisconsin, he
decided he wanted to be free. He offered to buy his way out of
ownership but Irene Emerson thought renting the family out for hire
was too lucrative and she refused. Since slavery was only partially
legal in Missouri, Dred Scott took the matter to court.
Missouri, in precedent cases, had a history of freeing slaves
who had been transported into free states or territories. Therefore,
when Dred Scott went to trial he was optimistic of an easy victory.
Unfortunately, he lost the case due to an absurd minor technicality;
the prosecuting attorneys had failed to establish that Irene Emerson
had enslaved Dred Scott. The judge did, however, grant Dred Scott the
right to a retrial.
It took three years for the next trial to begin due to a cholera
outbreak, a fire in the courthouse, and delays on the part of the
legal teams. During that time, Dred Scott and his family were
temporarily transferred to ownership under the sheriff who continued
to rent them out for work, thereby holding the wages he earned in
escrow to be delivered to the winner of the case at the end of the
trial. This time the jury ruled in favor of Dred Scott but Irene
Emerson did not accept defeat. She complained that losing three
slaves and the escrow attached to them was too much of a financial
loss so she took the case to the Supreme Court of Missouri. Before
the case went to trial, Irene Emerson transferred ownership of Dred
Scott’s family to her brother, John Sandford since she had moved to
Massachusetts, ironically, to marry an abolitionist senator. The
Supreme Court of Missouri overturned the previous verdict on the
grounds that, times having changed, setting slaves free would cause a
major disruption and upheaval in society; in order to keep the state
in a condition of peace, there were to be no more emancipations of
slaves from then on.
Dred Scott was again granted a retrial. By this point he was
without any financial backers so an abolitionist lawyer agreed to
represent him in exchange for janitorial work in his office building.
The jury ruled in favor of Sandford because the Supreme Court of
Missouri ruled that Scott was to remain a slave and slaves had no
legal right to sue their owners.
After the fourth trial, John Sandford moved to New York and
continued to rent out Dred Scott and his family as an absentee owner.
During this time, Scott continued to plead for a retrial but since
Sandford was living out of state, the case had to be taken to the
Supreme Court of the United States. In March of 1857, the Supreme
Court ruled 7 – 2 in favor of John Sandford. In a 200 page
explanation of the ruling, Supreme Court justice Roger Taney
explained that the writers of the Constitution had never intended for
African-American people to be considered citizens of the United
States; they were brought to America to act as laborers with the same
legal rights as domesticated farm animals and other forms of property
for white people. He reasoned that since it was impossible for
African-Americans to be citizens, it was impossible for them to take
a case to court. Therefore, John Sandford was found innocent. The two
dissenting Supreme Court justices countered this by saying that if
Dred Scottt, as an African-American, could not legally take a slave
owner to court, then there was no logical ground for accepting the
verdict of the case anyhow. But the emotions of the other Supreme
Court judges overruled their ability to think sensibly. Dred Scott
had lost again but his life was not over.
In addition to the absurd verdict, the justices of the Supreme
Court had made another terrible miscalculation. Since slavery was
such a divisive issue, they mistakenly thought that their judgment in
the Dred Scott case would put the controversy behind so the nation
could move on to other matters. But the Abolitionists reacted to
their verdict with rage. In response to their fury, the southern
secessionist movement began to grow and plans to initiate the
Confederacy began. Instead of uniting the nation, the Supreme Court
divided the nation further. Hostility between the two sides exploded
and soon the Civil War would begin. Meanwhile, the status of the
Supreme Court sank so low that they were unable to regain
respectability until much later in American history.
John Sandford soon died and ownership of Dred Scott, Harriet
Robinson, and their daughter Eliza was transferred to Taylor Blow,
the son of Scott’s first owner. Feeling sympathetic to Dred Scott’s
plight, Blow filed manumission papers with the state court in
Missouri and Dred Scott, along with his family, were emancipated in
1857. The Abolitionists were ecstatic and Dred Scott became a
celebrity. He went to work as a porter in a St. Louis hotel. Sadly
his freedom was short-lived and he died of tuberculosis less than two
years after being set free and living the greatest eighteen months of
his life.
Reference
Kelly, Alfred H. and Harbison, Winfred A. The American
Constitution: Its Origins and Development. W.W. Norton and
Company, 1946.
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