Fort Snelling and the Scotts

Fort Snelling was completed in eighteen twenty-five on the bluff above the Dakota confluence. The United States Army built it to assert sovereignty over the upper Mississippi and to control the fur trade. It was, by the standards of remote frontier postings, a reasonably comfortable station, and officers brought enslaved people with them from the South to work in their households.

One of those officers was Dr. John Emerson, an Army surgeon posted to Fort Snelling in eighteen thirty-six. He brought with him an enslaved man named Dred Scott.

Scott had already lived in free territory, in Illinois, before coming to Fort Snelling. Now he was living at the fort, which sat in the territory that the Missouri Compromise of eighteen twenty had designated free soil. Under that law and the Northwest Ordinance, residence in free territory could form the legal basis for a claim of freedom.

Dred Scott met Harriet Robinson at Fort Snelling. She was an enslaved woman owned by the Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro, who lived near the fort. Taliaferro officiated their marriage himself, an act that later had legal significance, because performing a marriage acknowledged the legal personhood of the parties. The Scotts were later taken back to Missouri when Emerson's postings moved south and east.

In eighteen forty-six, Dred and Harriet Scott sued for their freedom in Missouri circuit court, arguing that their years of residence on free soil had made them legally free. The case went through state courts and federal courts for eleven years. In eighteen fifty-seven, Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. The court held that no person of African descent, enslaved or free, could be a citizen of the United States and had no standing to sue in federal court. Taney also ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.

The decision inflamed the country. Abraham Lincoln argued against it directly in his debates with Stephen Douglas. The Dred Scott decision is widely recognized by historians as one of the significant accelerants of the Civil War. The Scotts were eventually freed by a private manumission in eighteen fifty-seven, shortly after the ruling. Dred Scott died a free man in Saint Louis in eighteen fifty-eight, one year after the decision bearing his name. Harriet Scott outlived him by eighteen years.

Fort Snelling State Park preserves the site today. The Minnesota Historical Society operates a restored fort on the bluff, where Dred and Harriet Scott's years here are part of the central interpretation.