Dred Scott Decision: The Lawsuit That Started The Civil War

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The Chief Justice of the United States was dying and would not live out the day. On October 12, 1864, three physicians were summoned to Roger B. Taney’s small bedroom in a stucco house on Indiana Avenue. When Dr. James C. Hall, the chief justice’s usual physician, entered, Taney expressed his regret at not being able to rise. After an examination, all three physicians agreed that the end was mere hours away. Taney’s semi-invalid daughter, Ellen, sat by her father’s bedside. ‘My dear child,’ he said in a nearly inaudible voice, ‘my race is run. I have no desire to stay longer in this painful world, but for my poor children.’

Dr. Hall, perhaps to distract his patient, read from an article in the Baltimore Sun about the election soon to be held in Maryland. Voters would decide whether or not to adopt a state constitution under which slaves would be set free without compensation to their owners. He then read a letter printed by the newspaper suggesting that the oath of allegiance proposed by President Abraham Lincoln and included in the new constitution might be taken even though conscience disapproved. ‘There must be no compromise of principle,’ said the chief justice with surprising strength.

History does not record the thoughts of the physicians, but undoubtedly they recalled the great case of seven years earlier that had set in motion the events which would free the slaves in Maryland — and later every state — and had all but extinguished the old order, just as Taney’s life was flickering out. Whatever else he did in that case, the chief justice had not compromised.

The great case was Scott v. Sandford, the most consequential opinion ever issued by the U.S. Supreme Court. The author of the opinion was Chief Justice Taney, who held that Negroes in bondage were property without rights and that Congress had no power to limit the expansion of slavery. The opinion ignited a political firestorm that set the nation irrevocably on the path to what novelist/historian Shelby Foote has called ‘the crossroads of our being.’

An illiterate slave, Dred Scott, as humble a litigant as could be imagined, managed to get the case to the Supreme Court. Little is known of Scott’s origin, other than he was born in Virginia on the farm of the Peter Blow family, which later moved to St. Louis and became prominent. In St. Louis, Scott was sold by the Blow family to a U.S. Army doctor named John Emerson. Dr. Emerson was eventually ordered to a fort in Illinois, a free state, and then to Fort Snelling in what is now Minnesota but was then a territory where slavery was banned under the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Emerson took Scott with him as a personal valet, also planning to hire him out to residents of the forts, a common practice at the time. At Fort Snelling, Scott met and married slave girl Harriet Robinson, who had been acquired by Emerson from the fort’s Indian agent. Dred Scott managed to raise two children and keep his family from being sold — no mean feat for a slave.

Emerson, accompanied by his slaves, returned to St. Louis after leaving the Army. After his sudden death in 1843, his wife Irene became the Scotts’ owner. Dred Scott tried to buy his freedom, but Irene Emerson refused to let the family go. Scott then demonstrated a remarkable ability to find lawyers to bring a series of lawsuits aimed at attaining his own and his family’s freedom.

Dred and Harriet Scott’s first petitions were filed in state court in St. Louis in 1846. Their lawyers relied on an 1824 Missouri Supreme Court case, Winny v. Whitesides, in which the Court held that when a master takes a slave to a free state ‘and by the length of residence there indicates an intention of making that place his residence and that of his slave,’ the slave is permanently freed. The court had followed the Winny ruling in every similar case presented over the next two decades, including one, Rachel v. Walker, where the slave won her freedom because her owner, a U.S. Army officer, had taken her to Fort Snelling in free territory. The Scotts’ claim appeared to be open and shut.

The case was tried twice, in 1847 and again in 1850, in what is now known in St. Louis as the Old Courthouse. As the Scotts walked into the building on the first day of trial they could have passed a slave auction, since the courthouse steps were used by St. Louis slave dealers. Such was the peculiarity of slave law that the Scotts could sue for their freedom inside a courthouse on whose outside steps they might be bought and sold.

Both trials were presided over by Judge Alexander Hamilton, an anti-slavery Pennsylvanian. The simple task of the Scotts’ attorneys was to prove that Irene Emerson had owned Dred and Harriet in a free state or territory. Because slaves were barred from testifying, even in their own lawsuits, the Scotts’ proof had to come from former residents of the Army forts who had known the Emersons and their slaves.

The Scotts’ lawyers botched the trial by calling the wrong witness from Fort Snelling, one Samuel Russell. He testified that, while Dred Scott had been hired out to his wife, he had no knowledge of Irene Emerson’s ownership of the Scotts. As a result, the jury returned a verdict for Irene Emerson. As historian Don E. Fehrenbacher later wrote, ‘The decision had the absurd effect of allowing Mrs. Emerson to keep her slaves simply because no one had proved that they were her slaves.’ The Scotts’ attorneys moved for a new trial, arguing that they had been surprised by Russell’s testimony. Judge Hamilton granted the motion for retrial.

Dred Scott managed to find new lawyers. At the 1850 trial they called Mrs. Russell, who testified that Irene Emerson was the owner of the Scotts. Judge Hamilton gave a charge based on the Winny case that required a verdict for the Scotts if the jury found that they had resided either in a free state or in a territory in which the Missouri Compromise barred slavery, which they indisputably had. The jury found in favor of the Scotts.

Irene Emerson appealed the case to the Missouri Supreme Court, where it was heard in 1852. The timing could not have been worse for the Scotts because sectional conflict over slavery had begun to boil over. In an opinion filled with resentful language, the Missouri Supreme Court, by a vote of 2-1, reversed the judgment freeing the Scotts. The court repudiated its rulings in the Winny v. Whitesides and Rachel v. Walker cases and excoriated perceived Northern hypocrisy about slavery: ‘we will not go to them to learn law, morality or religion on the subject.’

There Dred Scott’s quest for freedom could have ended. But this persistent slave managed to find new lawyers to take up his cause. His adversary had also changed — Irene Emerson had remarried and left St. Louis, and now her brother, John Sanford, who lived in New York, owned the Scott family. Dred Scott’s new attorney was Roswell Field, a lawyer from Vermont who left for St. Louis after an ill-fated marriage to a much younger woman. Field was later assisted by young Harvard Law School graduate and fellow Vermonter Arba Crane, who formed a close friendship with Dred Scott. Field filed a new suit in federal court on the basis of Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, commonly known as the diversity clause, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over suits between citizens of different states. Scott, alleged to be a free citizen of Missouri, would be suing John Sanford, a citizen of New York. It was not a far-fetched theory because several Southern courts had recognized that the act of emancipation conferred at least some citizenship rights on a freed slave.

Scott v. Sandford (the federal courts misspelled Sanford’s name) was filed in the federal circuit court of St. Louis in 1853. 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. Wells rejected Sanford’s argument that Negroes of African ancestry could never be citizens within the meaning of the diversity clause. He held that ‘every person born in the United States and capable of holding property was a citizen having the right to sue in the United States courts.’

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Tags: African American History, American Civil War, Civil War Times, Historical Conflicts, Politics, Social History