The Old Courthouse: Where Dred Scott Sued for His Freedom

The domed building just west of the Gateway Arch is one of the most legally significant structures still standing in the United States. The Old Courthouse of Saint Louis was built between eighteen thirty-nine and eighteen sixty-two, and the cases argued inside its courtrooms helped push the country toward civil war.

The most consequential began in April of eighteen forty-six, when an enslaved man named Dred Scott filed suit in this building claiming that he and his wife Harriet were legally free. Their argument was straightforward: they had lived for years in free territories, in Illinois and in what is now Minnesota, and under Missouri law as it had long been interpreted, residence on free soil meant freedom. The courtroom was on the first floor, west wing.

The first trial went against the Scotts on a technicality. A retrial in eighteen fifty found in their favor, a jury ruling that Dred and Harriet Scott should be free. That ruling was appealed. The Missouri Supreme Court overturned it in eighteen fifty-two, reversing decades of precedent. The case moved to federal courts and ultimately to the United States Supreme Court, which in eighteen fifty-seven issued the Dred Scott decision, one of the most catastrophic rulings in American legal history. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that Black people, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens and had no right to sue in federal court. The Scotts were returned to slavery.

Dred Scott was quietly freed by his owner a few months after the Supreme Court ruled. He died of tuberculosis in September of eighteen fifty-eight, a free man for less than two years.

The Old Courthouse also hosted more than three hundred other freedom suits filed by enslaved people between the seventeen nineties and the Civil War, and the suffrage case of Virginia Minor, who sued for the right to vote in eighteen seventy-two. It is now part of Gateway Arch National Park.