Their lawyer moved for a new trial. Irene Emerson quickly made arrangements for the Scotts to be put under the charge of the St. Louis County sheriff. The sheriff was responsible for hiring out the Scotts and collecting and keeping their wages until the freedom suit was resolved.
Dred Scott worked another two years as a hired out slave with no income before his case came to trial again. Louis in , and a subsequent outbreak of cholera. Finally, on January 12, , the case was heard, and the jury ruled in favor of the Scotts. Dred Scott and his family were free.
With the assistance of her brother, Mrs. Emerson appealed her case to the Missouri Supreme Court. On February 12, , the case was renamed Dred Scott v. Irene Emerson, and its outcome would apply to Harriet.
Again, there was a lengthy wait before the new case went to trial. In the meantime, Mrs. Emerson left St. Louis, moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, and married Dr.
Calvin Clifford Chaffee, an antislavery congressman. Chaffee was unaware that his new wife owned slaves and that she was resisting their plea for freedom. On March 22, , the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the earlier ruling. Dred Scott was still a slave, despite his years living in free states.
In this decision, the highest court in Missouri upheld the rights of slave owners over the rights of slaves. Tensions and outbursts over the issue of slavery were now regular occurrences throughout the nation.
Dred and Harriet Scott did not give up. Eventually, Field arranged for the case to go before the U. Supreme Court. Sanford case. On March 6, , Dred Scott finally received a decision about his suit for freedom. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Scott, because of his race, was not a citizen of the United States. He had no right to bring suit in a federal court. The entire Scott family was to remain enslaved. Chaffee transferred ownership of Scott and his family to Taylor Blow in St.
Chaffee, however, would only transfer ownership if she could collect the wages that had been held by the sheriff for the past eight years. Emerson's brother, who had assumed responsibility for John Emerson's estate. The court also ruled against Scott in this suit, spurring in Scott's appeal to the U. Supreme Court. Supreme Court Ruling Seven of the nine judges of the U. Supreme Court ruled that not only was Dred Scott a slave, but that as a slave, Scott had no right to bring suit in the federal courts on any matter.
The court ruled that the Missouri Compromise of , which prohibited slavery in northern territories, was unconstitutional. Therefore, although Scott had lived in northern territories, he had never earned his freedom. The Brink of Civil War The American public reacted very strongly to the ruling, fearing that this case would set precedent for all slaves, and slavery would spread unchecked. The Republican party, founded in to prohibit the spread of slavery, renewed their fight to gain control of Congress and the courts.
Emerson remarried. The Blows gave the Scotts their freedom in May The lawsuit again asserted that Scott had been freed by his residence in Illinois and at Fort Snelling. The case was assigned to Judge Robert W. Wells, a Virginian who had been attorney general of Missouri. While Scott had convinced the court that it had the jurisdiction to hear his case, he still had to prove that his travels to Illinois and Fort Snelling had freed him under the law of Missouri.
The case went to trial in Judge Wells, though sympathetic to the Scotts, had no choice but to give a charge that reflected the ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court in Scott v. Emerson , since the federal case concerned solely a wrongful imprisonment charge and Scott had never proven unequivocally in any state case that he was declared free in Illinois.
Sitting on that highest court were four slave state justices, four justices from free states and Roger Taney from Maryland, a border state that permitted slavery. It is easy in hindsight to see why the Scott lawyers might have viewed Taney as a possible fifth vote in their favor. As a young lawyer, Taney had defended an abolitionist minister against charges of inciting slaves to rebellion. Taney had freed his own slaves and, after joining the Supreme Court, voted to free the slaves in the Amistad case.
In appearance he was frail and soft-spoken, to some resembling an old wizard, but his eyes shone with bright and piercing intelligence. The case was argued in the Supreme Court in and again in late , just as Americans began to debate slavery with more than words.
On May 21, , border ruffians sacked the free-state town of Lawrence, Kan. The Scott case also coincided with tragedy in the Taney family. In the summer that the case reached the Supreme Court, an outbreak of cholera was reported in Norfolk. Her mother died of a stroke the same day. Taney, then 78 years old, had begun writing his autobiography at Old Point Comfort. Taney was leaving Old Point, the scene of many happy summers and of one terrible tragedy, never to return, and the writing of the story of his life, which had begun there, was never to be resumed.
After the first argument, it was clear that Geyer and Johnson were defending nothing less than slavery itself. In challenging the authority of Congress to limit the expansion of slavery, the Sanford attorneys struck at the foundation of the legislative compromises that had saved the Union.
Instead of issuing an opinion, the Supreme Court set the case down for another argument in December Following the second argument, the Supreme Court was initially divided. Finally, a majority coalesced around a sweeping opinion. At the suggestion of Justice James M. Grier to join a majority opinion.
Buchanan wrote to Justice Grier, who agreed to concur with the chief justice. On March 6, , the Supreme Court was filled, and many were turned away. Taney then went on to issue a stunning ruling that attempted to end the slavery controversy forever.
That morning freedom had been national and slavery local. By the afternoon, it was the other way around. The country was a tinderbox, and now the Supreme Court had lit a match. For the first time, Northern anger was not directed only at the expansion of slavery but at the South. Southerners warned that the opinion must be accepted by the North or there would be disunion. For two months Justice Taney refused to publish his opinion, and even ordered the Supreme Court clerk not to give a copy to dissenting Justice Curtis.
Meanwhile, Taney was rewriting sections of his opinion to respond to the cascade of Northern anger that had descended on the Supreme Court. That same year, on August 27 in Freeport, Ill. Douglas held the second of their famous debates, which were largely about the Dred Scott case.
At its convention, the Democratic Party came apart over the Dred Scott decision. Lincoln ran as the sole Republican candidate for president against a fractured Democratic Party that produced three candidates, one being Stephen A. In one of the most ironic moments in American history, Chief Justice Taney swore in Lincoln as president in In Taney sat for a portrait by the painter Emanuel Leutze.
The chief justice wears black robes in the portrait. His left hand rests on a pad of paper, while his right hand hangs limply, almost lifelessly against the right arm of the chair. His eyes are bleak, as though he had seen into a ruinous future that he had wrought, but had not intended and could never undo. Taney remained on the court during the Civil War until his death in He was described by a diarist of the time as one of the saddest figures in Washington.
And what of his adversary, Dred Scott? Part 1: Part 2: Part 3: Resource Bank Contents. Dred Scott first went to trial to sue for his freedom in Ten years later, after a decade of appeals and court reversals, his case was finally brought before the United States Supreme Court.
In what is perhaps the most infamous case in its history, the court decided that all people of African ancestry -- slaves as well as those who were free -- could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit slavery in its territories.
Scott, needless to say, remained a slave. Born around , Scott migrated westward with his master, Peter Blow. They travelled from Scott's home state of Virginia to Alabama and then, in , to St.
Louis, Missouri.
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