Dred Scott was born enslaved in Virginia around 1799, taken to Alabama and then St. Louis by Peter Blow, and sold to Army surgeon John Emerson. Emerson’s postings took Scott to Illinois and to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was banned under the Missouri Compromise. There he married Harriet Robinson in a civil ceremony performed by her owner, Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro, and their daughter Eliza was born on a steamboat in free territory. After Emerson died in 1843, his widow Irene leased the family out and in 1846 refused Scott’s offer to buy their freedom.

Backed by the Blow family, Scott sued under Missouri’s once free, always free precedent. He lost in 1847 on a hearsay technicality, won a retrial in 1850 after a cholera epidemic and a great fire, then lost when the Missouri Supreme Court abandoned its precedent in 1852. The federal case against John Sanford reached the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled in 1857 that Black Americans could not be citizens and struck down the Missouri Compromise. The episode traces the outrage, the Panic of 1857, and how the Scotts were freed anyway.

• President-elect James Buchanan pressed a Northern justice to join the Southern majority before the ruling.
• The Missouri judges wrote that a dark and fell spirit on slavery had changed the country.
• Irene Emerson married abolitionist congressman Calvin Chaffee, and the family was transferred to Taylor Blow.
• Taylor Blow freed Dred and Harriet Scott and their daughters on May 26, 1857.
• Scott worked as a hotel porter in St. Louis and died of tuberculosis in 1858, while Harriet lived until 1876.