The Freed Man Shall Not Be Free Dred Scott The Freed Man Shall Not Be Free

Who was Dred Scott? Dred Scott was a man born a slave in 1799. Growing up in Southampton County, VA, history is not sure whether Mr. Scott’s real name is “Dred” or if this is a shortened version of Etheldred (this name is found in some of Mrs. Scott’s writings). Owned by a Mr. Peter Blow, Scott moved to Alabama in 1818. By 1830 the Blow family had given up farming and once again relocated, this time to St. Louis, Missouri, where they ran a boarding house. Around the age of 31 Dred was sold to John Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army.

So What Happened? Pg. 278 - “Dred Scott, the slave to a U.S. Army surgeon named John Emerson, moved with his master to Rock Island, Illinois, in 1834… What should we assume about Dred Scott after he moved to Illinois? … Scott remained with Emerson for two years on the army base, even though Illinois, under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, prohibited slavery”.

“In 1836, Emerson was assigned to Fort Snelling (present-day Minnesota), which was part of the Wisconsin Territory above the Missouri Compromise line, again taking Scott with him”. John Emerson died in 1843: Dred Scott, and his wife (Harriet), became the property of Emerson’s wife, Irene. With help from friends of Mr. Blow, Dred Scott and his wife filed a lawsuit against Mrs. Emerson in the St. Louis Circuit Court. The court ruled in favor of Mrs. Emerson but allowed Dred to refile their lawsuit.

“Scott’s suit argued that his residence in both Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was prohibited, made him free… A Missouri jury agreed in 1850. Emerson appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, which in 1852 reversed the lower court ruling, arguing that the lower court had abused the principle of comity, by which one state agreed to observe the laws of another”. If Scott was considered a citizen by virtue of freedom in one state, then the law of comity would require that he be free in all states. However, if it were decided that he were personal property then the court would rule that comity law prevailed for Mrs. Emerson in which case she had the right to retain her property.

Mrs. Emerson, have remarried and moved to Massachusetts, left Dred Scott to her brother, John Sanford, who had moved to New York. Having a greater amount of freedom, Dred Scott filed a new lawsuit in his name Scott v. Sandford (John’s last name was misspelled on the court documents). Pg. 279 - “A circuit court ruled against Scott once again, and his lawyers appealed to the United States Supreme Court. When the Court heard the case in 1856, it had to rule on whether Scott could even bring the lawsuit (as a slave)”; then possibly they would examine his argument for freedom based on residence. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who favored slavery, the Court ruled that the laws of Missouri were properly applied. HOWEVER, in February 1857 the justices wrote individual opinions on the case…

Pg. 279 - “Taney’s decision included the position that freedmen were citizens of one state but NOT the United States. Nor could emancipated slaves or their progeny [descendants] be free in all states because a citizen had to be born a citizen, and no slaves were. He also dismissed… any citizenship rights that states offered blacks”. Chief Justice Taney also held that the Missouri Compromise and Northwest Ordinance were unconstitutional. In his own words Taney considered African Americans “as a subordinate and inferior class of beings [who] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”.

Unforeseen Consequences Railroad expansion, particularly those running east- to-west, suddenly faced a great uncertainty in relation to the Kansas and Nebraska Territories. Had the territories become either fully pro-slave or entirely free-soil, the area would have stabilized and the economy would have settled around the area. With the court’s ruling, however, there was a fear of Bleeding Kansas taking on a new, larger scope. This fear led many investors to back out of their support for the railroads and railroad expansion collapsed. The ensuing Panic of 1857 spread to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia where the banks had held the bonds for the railroad expansion.

Because the South’s economy depended more on the cotton industry than on railway expansion many Southerners proclaimed that “King Cotton” had allowed the South to surpass the economy of the North. Fire eaters [proslavery extremists in the South] insisted that slavery had proved its superiority to the factories of the North.