March 6, 1857: The Courthouse Where the Constitution Broke

Dred Scott filed his first freedom suit in the Old Courthouse across from the river in eighteen forty-six. He had been enslaved by an army surgeon named John Emerson, who brought him to Illinois and to Wisconsin Territory, both of which prohibited slavery. Emerson died in eighteen forty-three, and Scott sued on the principle that his residence in free territory had made him free. He won twice at the trial level. He lost at the Missouri Supreme Court in eighteen fifty-two. The case reached Washington.

On March sixth, eighteen fifty-seven, Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court. It ran to more than ninety pages. The core of it fit in one sentence. Black people, Taney wrote, whether enslaved or free, had no standing to bring a case in federal court because they were not and could not be citizens of the United States. They had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. The Missouri Compromise, which had excluded slavery from northern territories, was declared unconstitutional. The legal mechanism that had kept slavery geographically contained was gone.

Dred Scott had fought in the courts for eleven years. He was freed anyway, in May of eighteen fifty-seven, by his then-owner, who acted after the ruling. Scott died the following year. The research finds the year eighteen fifty-eight in two sources, with a specific date of September seventeenth found in only one. He had been free for a little over a year.

His wife Harriet lived until eighteen seventy-six. She was alive for the Civil War, for the Thirteenth Amendment, for Reconstruction, and for its collapse. The courthouse where the case began still stands a few hundred feet from the Arch that memorializes the same era's westward expansion. Both buildings are telling the truth. They are not telling the same story.