Dred Scott

Eleven Years in Other Men's Courtrooms

Dred Scott was born enslaved in Virginia around 1799 and spent most of his life the property of others, moved from state to state and territory to territory as his owners' postings required. In the 1830s his owner, an army surgeon named John Emerson, carried him first into Illinois, a free state, and then into the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was barred by federal law. Years later, back in slaveholding Missouri and following Emerson's death, Scott sued for his freedom and that of his wife and daughters, arguing that residence on free soil had already made them free — a claim with real footing in Missouri precedent at the time he filed it.

The case took eleven years to climb from a St. Louis circuit court to the United States Supreme Court. In March 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote for the majority that no Black person, free or enslaved, could ever be a citizen of the United States or bring suit in federal court, and that Congress had no authority to bar slavery from the territories at all. It is widely judged the worst decision the Court has ever handed down — it stripped away a compromise that had held the sections together for decades and pushed the country measurably closer to war. Scott was freed by a later owner within months of the ruling. He did not get much use of that freedom: he died of tuberculosis in September 1858, a year before the country he could not fully belong to began tearing itself apart.

A man spent eleven years fighting to be recognized as a person before the law, and the law answered him with a verdict, not a portrait.