The Washington University Libraries presents an online exhibit of documents regarding the Dred Scott case. American slave Dred Scott (1795?-1858) and his wife Harriet filed suit for their freedom in the Saint Louis Circuit Court in 1846. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1857 that the Scotts must remain slaves.

Closely examines on of the Supreme Court's most infamous decisions: that went far beyond one slave's suit for "freeman" status by declaring that ALL blacks--freemen as well as slaves--were not, and never could become, U.S. citizens, bringing an end to the 1820 Missouri Compromise, while also resulting in the outrage that led to the Civil War.

On November 6, 1860, the people of the United States elected the nominee of the infant Republican Party as their sixteenth president. An obscure lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln had lost his two prior forays into national politics as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, but in a stunning turnaround that garnered 59% of the electoral votes, Lincoln beat Senator Stephen Douglas and three other candidates, including the incumbent vice president. Many Lincoln scholars and historians believe, as do I, that the single greatest reason for his extraordinary victory was a notorious 1857 decision by the United States Supreme Court in Scott v. Sandford.In a brutal decision that has been called the worst in the history of the court, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that a black man was not a man and had no rights a white man was bound to respect. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1857, Lincoln made Taney's abhorrent decision the basis of his "house divided" speech."A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."Douglas and the Democrats supported the Supreme Court decision. In a speech on the case, Lincoln said,"The Republicans inculcate, with whatever of ability they can, that the negro is a man; that his bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged. The Democrats deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible, crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him."Northern Democrats and Whigs agreed with Lincoln. They flocked to the Republican Party in the next presidential election and chose the man who would become The Great Emancipator and fight a war to free the Negro. Therefore, it can be claimed with authority that, but for the slave Dred Scott, there would have been no President Abraham Lincoln.Who was this illiterate slave Dred Scott, born and raised as Sam Blow in southern Virginia, and as a man barely passed five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet; who had the audacity, courage, and faith to persevere for ten years in state and federal court to gain his freedom? What moved him to endure whippings and vile threats and stand erect before a jury of white slaveholders, defiant in appealing the decisions of lofty appellate judges?The life of Dred Scott is the story of America from the beginning of the 19th century through the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, the Missouri Compromise, The War with Mexico, Bloody Kansas, and culminating in the War Between the States.It is also a moving personal tale of the life of a slave who wanted to be treated as a man, and, when he became a husband and a father, would stop at nothing in his quest for freedom for the girls he loved more than his own life.I have watched with dismay the fracturing of our great Nation along deep political, racial, ethnic, gender and socio-economic lines. Hate is strong. Healing of the divisions seems hopeless. But I believe that we can learn from the past, and the story of Dred Scott at a time when our country was similarly splitting apart is a lesson of hope for us today.This story does not just highlight the courage and determination of Dred, in the face of all obstacles; but notably, it is also a daring story of the grown children of his first master who loved Dred and knew of his humanity and risked losing everything in fighting for his freedom against the most powerful pro-slavery families in America-all the way to the United States Supreme Court ... and beyond. Dred Scott's history is a positive lesson for our time of great political, cultural, and racial division. An example of what we once were, and can become again, if we focus on our common humanity - which is so much greater than those things that divide us as a nation.

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Racial hatred is one of the ugliest of human emotions. And the United States not only once condoned it, it also mandated it?wove it right into the fabric of American jurisprudence. Federal and state governments legally suspended the free will of blacks for 150 years and then denied blacks equal protection of the law for another 150. How did such crimes happen in America? How were the laws of the land, even the Constitution itself, twisted into repressive and oppressive legislation that denied people their inalienable rights? Taking the Dred Scott case of 1957 as his shocking center, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano tells the story of how it happened and, through it, builds a damning case against American statesmen from Lincoln to Wilson, from FDR to JFK. Born a slave in Virginia, Dred Scott sued for freedom based on the fact that he had lived in states and territories where slavery was illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Scott, denied citizenship to blacks, and spawned more than a century of government-sponsored maltreatment that destroyed lives, suppressed freedom, and scarred our culture. Dred Scott's Revenge is the story of America's long struggle to provide a new context?one in which "All men are created equal," and government really treats them so.

The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law presents original research and the reflections of the nation's leading scholars who gathered in St. Louis to mark the 150th anniversary of what was arguably the most infamous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision, which held that African Americans "had no rights" under the Constitution and that Congress had no authority to alter that, galvanized Americans and thrust the issue of race and law to the center of American politics. --

The untold story of how one sensational trial propelled a self-taught lawyer and a future president into the national spotlight. In May of 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton barreled into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge, unalterably changing the course of American transportation history. Within a year, long-simmering tensions between powerful steamboat interests and burgeoning railroads exploded, and the nation’s attention, absorbed by the Dred Scott case, was riveted by a new civil trial. Dramatically reenacting the Effie Afton case—from its unlikely inception, complete with a young Abraham Lincoln’s soaring oratory, to the controversial finale—this “masterful” (Christian Science Monitor) account gives us the previously untold story of how one sensational trial propelled a self-taught lawyer and a future president into the national spotlight.