Civil War

Slavery + Scott

Posted at May 28, 2008 13:50

By Jerre Repass

Calvin C. Chaffee was in for quite a surprise. An abolitionist elected to
Congress, he had married the widow Irene Emerson in 1850. He was
apparently unaware that she owned arguably the most prominent slave in
America, Dred Scott. Rather interesting baggage.

Scott had garnered attention after being
involved in a number of trials leading all
the way to the United States Supreme Court.
Originally born into slavery, his life story
turned out to be pivotal to the beginning of
the Civil War.

From infancy, he was the property of the
Peter Blow family. Slaves were financial assets,
which could be used in the same way as
property. As such, Scott was sold to Dr. John
Emerson when the Blows suffered money
problems. Many records show that Peter Blow
died, which resulted in Scott being sold to
Emerson. An army surgeon, Emerson took
his slave with him as he received assignments
outside of Missouri. Two of the places they
worked, Illinois and the Wisconsin Territories,
were under the Northwest Ordinance, which
prohibited slavery.

Eventually, Emerson and Scott each got
married and in 1842 returned to the slave
state of Missouri, living in St. Louis. The
doctor soon died, but his widow made use
of her “assets,” hiring the Scotts out to work
for other families. Scott was illiterate and may
not have been aware of the doctrine, “once
free, always free,” which would have made
his family free people since they had lived in
a free state and territory.

In an interesting turn of events, Scott
reconnected with the Blow family, who first
owned him. They were willing to finance
his efforts to be legally free, and so in 1846,
he filed suit, going to trial in 1847 in the old
courthouse in downtown St. Louis.

A series of trials followed. Scott lost the
first but won the second round when the
jury said “once free, always free” should
prevail. But Widow Emerson and her brother
appealed. The 1852 decision went their way
and was explained as follows: “Times now are
not as they were when the previous decisions
on this subject were made.” Scott filed a new
suit in St. Louis against Mrs. Emerson’s brother,
which went to trial in 1854. Scott lost, but
the United States Supreme Court accepted and
heard the appeal in 1857.

In the context of the times, the case was
more about property than people. Slaves
belonged to their owners, not as people but
as property. Owners didn’t see the relevance
between where they happened to be—in a
free or slave state—and continued ownership
of their property.

The makeup of the United States Supreme
Court at that time was crucial. The chief
justice was Roger Brooke Taney. He was born
in Maryland into a wealthy family of tobacco
farmers who were also slave owners.

In 1835, Andrew Jackson submitted
Taney’s name to be an associate justice. After
the death of Chief Justice John Marshall that
same year, President Jackson wanted Taney
confirmed as chief justice. That’s what happened
in March of 1836, despite a bitter fight
against the appointment.

Arguments took place before the Supreme
Court in Washington, D.C., in 1856, with
sessions devoted to the question in both February and December. The final majority
decision was handed down March 6, 1857.
Taney wrote the opinion, declaring that the
attitudes toward slavery when the constitution
was constructed were not favorable to a
slave ever becoming a citizen. The court later
widened that to include a prohibition against
citizenship for even the free descendants of
slaves and determined that Congress could not
forbid slavery in the territories.

Again the property question was
addressed: Slaves were property and not
citizens, so they could not bring suit in a
federal court. Justice Taney said that Slave
Scott as property was subject to the provisions
of the Fifth Amendment, which
prohibited taking property from an owner
without due process.

By this time, Irene Emerson, who had
been married to Dr. Emerson, had been
widowed and remarried to Calvin Chaffee,
the abolitionist. Her brother, who had championed
her through the first trials, was in
an insane asylum. Chaffee, embarrassed
and criticized, arranged Scott’s return to
his original owners, the Blow family. They
had aided his struggle for freedom and now
emancipated him on May 26, 1857. He
worked as a freeman, laboring as a porter at
Barnum’s Hotel until his death in 1858.

The aftershocks of the decision were
incredible. Taney labeled opposition to slavery
as northern aggression. He was widely criticized
for the Dred Scott decision, of which
Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts
said: “The opinion of the chief justice in
the case of Dred Scott was more thoroughly
abominable than anything of the kind in the
history of courts. Judicial baseness reached its
lowest point on that occasion.”

But there was another result: The decision
inflamed the country and is considered
one of the most influential forces in the
outbreak of the Civil War. Alongside the
book Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the newspaper
The Liberator, publication of the court decision
made common people aware of what
slavery meant and moved them to action.

This year is the 150th anniversary of that
decision. Events at St. Louis during the year
have commemorated the Dred Scott decision
and taught today’s citizens some of the basic
civil rights that many take for granted.

An exhibit in St. Louis’s Old Courthouse
will continue through March 2008. This is
especially poignant as the site where the first
trials began a century and a half ago.

There are original documents collected
from the St. Louis Circuit Court, the Missouri
Supreme Court, the City of St. Louis, the
National Archives, the St. Louis Mercantile
Library, the Missouri Historical Society, and
the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
The exhibits in the courthouse are on three
subjects: the family story of the Scotts, the
story of the legal system at the time, and the
bigger picture of slavery in the 1800s.

There is a recreated courtroom environment
where reenactments of the case take
place. The original courtroom is set up as
well as additional courtrooms on the second
level to accommodate visitors.

On the weekend the exhibit opened,
students played the parts of lawyers of the
day; the judges’ parts were played by sitting
judges who took time to explain to the audience
how politics and pressures of the times
influenced the decisions judges made. The
National Park Service provides scripts for
groups that wish to schedule a reenactment,
a popular thing to do this celebration year.

Visitors to St. Louis can see a painting of
Dred Scott permanently on display at the
Missouri History Museum.

The Eugene Field House and Toy
Museum also has Dred Scott exhibits.
Eugene’s father Roswell Field was the
attorney who strategized the Scott lawsuit
so that it would be heard by the Supreme
Court. The display includes photographs
of letters from the Library of Congress
explaining the attorney’s role.

Another part of the exhibit compares the
lives of free and slave children 150 years
ago. The historical material in the exhibit
also illustrates well the hopelessness the
early civil rights cause experienced.

Visit https://cms.mwr.nps.gov/jeff/historyculture/
dredscottsesquicentennial.htm.

October 2007

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