Sources: Historic missourians, Twin City Pioneer Press, NPS
Harriet Robinson was born enslaved in Virginia around 1815. In the early 1830s her enslaver, Lawrence Taliaferro, brought her to Fort Snelling in what was then the Northwest Territory. Slavery was illegal there. She married her husband, Dred Scott in 1837. She and her husband traveled back and forth from free and slave territory with their new owner, John Emerson. During one trip between Louisiana and Minnesota, Harriet gave birth her first daughter, Eliza, on a steamboat on the Mississippi River.
In 1846 Harriet and Dred Scott determined that they would to take action to win their freedom. They filed separate petitions in the St. Louis Circuit Court. Their cases rested on their residence at Fort Snelling, in free territory. Several free states had laws on the books that held that if an enslaved person lived there for a certain length of time with their owner’s permission—as both Scotts had done—they would become free.
Finally, in 1857, the case, now titled Dred Scott v. Sandford, reached the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote the majority opinion. He argued that the framers of the Constitution had believed that Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Enslaved or free, he ruled, Black people were not citizens of the United States. Dred Scott and other Black people therefore had no right to bring freedom suits.The Court also struck down the Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery in most northern states and territories while allowing new areas in the South to enter the union as slave states. The decision contributed to the start of the American Civil War four years later.
The loss of their case was a devastating setback, but the Scotts gained their freedom a few months later. Their owner freed them on May 26, 1857.Harriet Robinson Scott remained in St. Louis as a free woman. She worked as a laundress for many years. She died at the age of 61 on June 17, 1876 and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, one of the first Black burial grounds in the city.
Sources: Historic missourians, Twin City Pioneer Press, NPS