ONIONS
Explanation:
In its 1857 decision that stunned the nation, the United States Supreme Court upheld slavery in United States territories, denied the legality of black citizenship in America, and declared the Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional. All of this was the result of an April 1846 action when Dred Scott innocently made his mark with an "X," signing his petition in a pro forma freedom suit, initiated under Missouri law, to sue for freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court. Desiring freedom, his case instead became the lightning rod for sectional bitterness and hostility that was only resolved by war.
image of Dred Scott
Dred Scott
Credit: Missouri Historical Society
"Dred Scott, a man of color, respectfully states. he is claimed as a slave."
(Petition to Sue for Freedom, 6 April 1846)
Initially, Scott's case for freedom was routine and relatively insignificant, like hundreds of others that passed through the St. Louis Circuit Court. The cases were allowed because a Missouri statute stated that any person, black or white, held in wrongful enslavement could sue for freedom. The petition that Dred Scott signed indicated the reasons he felt he was entitled to freedom. Scott's owner, Dr. John Emerson, was a United States Army surgeon who traveled to various military posts in the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory. Dred Scott traveled with him and, therefore, resided in areas where slavery was outlawed. Because of Missouri's long-standing "once free, always free" judicial standard in determining freedom suits, slaves who were taken to such areas were freed-even if they returned to the slave state of Missouri. Once the bonds of slavery were broken, they did not reattach.
Dred Scott was born to slave parents in Virginia sometime around the turn of the nineteenth century. His parents may have been the property of Peter Blow, or Blow may have purchased Scott at a later date. The mystery of exact ownership is one that would follow Dred Scott, and later his family, throughout their lives as slaves. With few records extant, it is difficult to identify exactly when ownership of the family was transferred to various parties. By 1830, Peter Blow had settled his family of four sons and three daughters and his six slaves in St. Louis. This was after having moved from Virginia to Alabama, to attempt farming near Huntsville, and, when that failed, a move from Alabama to Missouri. In St. Louis, Peter Blow undertook the running of a boarding house, the Jefferson Hotel. Within a year, though, his wife Elizabeth died and on June 23, 1832, Peter Blow passed away.
image of front view of St. Louis
Front view of St. Louis
Credit: Missouri Historical Society
The Blow children remained in St. Louis after the deaths of their parents and became well established in the city's society through marriage to prominent families. Charlotte Taylor Blow married Joseph Charless, Jr., in November 1831; his father had established the first newspaper west of the Mississippi River and had been a leading opponent of slavery while editor. Charless, Jr., operated a wholesale drug and paint store, Charless & Company (later Charless, Blow, & Company when brothers-in-law Henry Taylor Blow and Taylor Blow became partners). Martha Ella Blow married attorney Charles Drake in 1835. Drake is better known in history for his role in the creation of Missouri's 1865 constitution. As a leader of the Radical Republican Party after the Civil War, he was determined to punish those considered Southern sympathizers; the constitution he helped author took away many of their rights, including enfranchisement. Peter Ethelrod Blow married Eugenie LaBeaume in 1833. She was from an old French banking family; her oldest brother was a wealthy businessman who, in partnership with Blow, formed Peter E. Blow & Company. She had two other brothers; one was the St. Louis County sheriff for a time in the 1840s, and one, Charles Edmund LaBeaume, was a St. Louis attorney who played an important role in Dred Scott's freedom suits. All of these St. Louis connections proved helpful to Dred Scott.
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