Slavery's Big Victory.

• Author: PRICE, SEAN
• Position: 1857 Dred Scott case

In the 1857 Bred Scott case, the Supreme Court sowed the seeds of war

Dred Scott wanted his freedom. Like millions of other black slaves, the St. Louis, Missouri, resident had been treated as a piece of property, like a mule or a wagon. Now his quest for something better had taken him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he awaited its decision.

The date was March 6, 1857. The nation was embroiled in a hot debate over the spread of slavery, an institution basic to the economy of Southern states. On March 4, the new President, James Buchanan, had said in his inaugural address that this debate was "approaching its end." Wrong--it was nearing the brink of civil war. And what the Court said about Bred Scott would help to push it there.

Slavery had been a divisive issue since the earliest days of the growing Republic. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress had prohibited slavery in the area that is now Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had cooled tempers between North and South by admitting Missouri to the nation as a slave state while banning slavery in a huge chunk of the land gained from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

Dred Scott was born in Virginia around 1800. Records are few, but a Maryland slave's account hints at what his early life must have been like:

We lodged in log huts and on the bare ground. Wooden floors were an unknown luxury. In a single room were huddled, like cattle, ten or a dozen persons, men, women, and children.... Our beds were collections of straw and old rags, thrown down in the corners and boxed in with boards, a single blanket the only covering.

In 1833, Scott's owners sold him to a U.S. Army surgeon, John Emerson, of St. Louis, Missouri. Emerson took Scott with him when he was posted to Illinois, a "free" state that banned slavery, and to Minnesota, then part of the free territory of Wisconsin.

In the North, Scott could have left slavery at any time. But as an illiterate slave in isolated Army outposts, he probably didn't know that. Instead, he returned to Missouri with Emerson in 1840. When Emerson died in 1843, Scott, his wife, and two daughters became the property of the doctor's wife, Irene. In 1846, encouraged by his first owner's son, Scott sued in state court to win his family's freedom.

His case seemed strong. Legal precedents held that slaves living in the North became free for life. In 1852, however, Scott's case ended up in Missouri's pro-slavery...