Dred Scott’s Suit for Freedom
Although it is an embarrassment to me,
Missouri, the state where I was born and where I have lived again since 2004,
was a slave state from its beginning in 1821, and the Dred Scott case was closely
linked to Missouri.
Dred Scott was an enslaved man who was born in
Virginia between 1795 and 1799. Peter Blow, his enslaver, brought Scott and his
other slaves to St. Louis in 1830 and soon sold him to John Emerson, a surgeon
serving in the U.S. Army.
Emerson took Scott with him to Illinois and
then to Wisconsin Territory, both areas where slavery was illegal. But then the
doctor moved back to Missouri in 1840. Scott, though, claimed that since he had
lived in free territories, he should no longer be considered enslaved—and he
sued for his freedom.
He won his case, but after it was reversed by
the Mo. Supreme Court, Scott and his wife took their case to the U.S. Supreme
Court—and to their dismay and the dismay of many, the SCOTUS ruled against them
by a vote of 7-2.
However, in May 1857, Dred and Harriet Scott
appeared in the St. Louis Circuit Court and were formally freed— but he did not
live to enjoy his free status very long as he died of tuberculosis in September
of the next year.**
The Supreme Court in 1857
Of the nine members on
the Supreme Court in 1857—all White men, of course—five were from the South and
were slave owners. Two of the Northerners sided with the Southerners in voting
against Scott’s freedom.
Roger B. Taney was the Chief Justice and wrote
the infamous majority opinion of the Dred Scott decision. Taney (1777~1864) was
born into a wealthy, slave-owning family in Maryland. He was confirmed as a
Supreme Court Justice in 1836 and remained the Chief Justice until his death.
(In an interesting but unrelated Missouri connection,
a new county in south Missouri was officially organized in 1837 and named in
honor of the new Chief Justice. Many years later the now widely-known resort town
of Branson was incorporated in Taney County.)
In his infamous opinion, Taney wrote that the
majority held that “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and
sold as slaves,” whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and
therefore did not have the standing to sue in federal court.
Ironically, as Chief Justice, Taney was forced
to issue the presidential oath to Lincoln in March 1861, and to listen to
Lincoln’s inaugural address, where he criticized Taney and the Dred Scott decision,
but not directly by name.
After the Civil War, in 1868 the Fourteenth
Amendment overturned the Dred Scott decision by granting citizenship to all
those born in the United States, regardless of color or former enslavement.
The Supreme Court Now
From the beginning to the present, there have
been 115 Supreme Court Justices—and all but seven of those have been White men.
It was of the greatest significance when
Thurgood Marshall was confirmed as the first African American Justice in 1967, a
full 110 years after the Dred Scott decision.
And now Ketanji Brown Jackson will likely soon
be confirmed as the first Black woman to be seated on the Supreme Court.
Both Marshall and Jackson, as well as Justice
Clarence Thomas, are descendants of enslaved people who were not and could not
be U.S. citizens according to the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
But now the Supreme Court needs to act again
to ensure that African Americans, whose full citizenship was acknowledged in
the 1860s, can exercise their right to vote despite new Jim Crow laws currently
encroaching on the voting rights of Black citizens.
_____
** Here
is the link to a lengthy and informative talk about the Dred Scott case
that was given by (now) retiring Justice Stephen Breyer in 2009.
Marvelous piece! As a child, I learned of this case pretty early in life since I lived in St. Louis where the old Courthouse where the, I think, first case was decided and is still standing. I didn't know until many years later that Missouri was a slave state.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Anton. (And thanks for posting a link to this on Facebook.)
DeleteI grew up in Missouri, but a long way from St. Louis, and I don't remember hearing/knowing about the Dred Scott case during my school years in northwest Missouri. And I also didn't know then that Missouri was a slave state, so it was a disappointment when I learned the truth about that.
Here are comments from Thinking Friend Glenn Hinson in Kentucky:
ReplyDelete"Thanks for sharing this, Leroy. The nomination of Jackson as the first African American woman is a moment when we need to remember the Dred Scott case, if for no other reason than because our history still comes back to haunt us. Yet some state legislatures are doing their darnedest to keep our children from learning the full story."
Here is an item in the "Congressional Chronicle" on June 29 last year. It is directly related to the content of this blog article.
ReplyDelete"The House, in a vote of 285-120, approved a measure to replace statues in the U.S. Capitol of Confederates and others who believed in racism. The bill specifically replaces a bust of former Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, who authored the Dred Scott decision, with one of former Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court."
Here's a link to a list of the 13 Worst Supreme Court Decisions of All Time. The partisan motivations of its members were made particularly apparent in Bush v. Gore. Even Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has come to regret the ruling.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this, Clif. I assume since the list was made in 2015 it was too soon to assess the "badness" of the 2013 decision on voting rights.
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