In the spring of 1846, Dred Scott and his wife Harriet Robinson Scott thought they had a chance at freedom. They lived in Missouri, a “slave state,” but their enslavers had previously taken them to free states or territories where slavery was outlawed. Other enslaved people had won so-called “freedom suits” in St. Louis courts thanks to Missouri’s “once free, always free” doctrine, which held that once an enslaved person had been taken to free territory, they remained free even after they returned to a “slave state.”
The man who enslaved Dred and Harriet Scott and their two small children, Eliza and Lizzie, died in 1843, leaving his estate to his widow. Enslavers’ deaths sometimes resulted in children being sold away from Black families at estate sales. Mr. Scott tried to buy his family’s freedom, but the widow turned him down.
After that, the Scotts filed a freedom suit in St. Louis Circuit Court. “This is a case of a family that wants to stay together,” said historian and legal scholar Lea VanderVelde. The Scotts cited the case of a woman identified as Rachel who, like them, had been taken by her enslaver to Fort Snelling, a free territory where slavery was illegal, before returning to Missouri. She later won her freedom suit.
The Scotts’ case moved slowly through the legal system, reaching the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856. Most of the justices were from families that enslaved people. Chief Justice Roger Taney, the son of wealthy Maryland tobacco planters, had emancipated the enslaved people he had inherited, but he remained, at 80, a staunch defender of white supremacy—as was Andrew Jackson, the president who had put him on the court. By one account, Justice Samuel Nelson’s tuition at Middlebury College was financed in part by his father selling an enslaved girl.
On the morning of March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Taney read aloud the 7-2 majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Scotts were not, and never could be, American citizens, the Court held, and therefore had no right to sue in federal court. They would remain enslaved.