On this day, Dred Scott and his wife Harriet filed a lawsuit against Irene Emerson in St. Louis, Missouri, seeking their freedom. The Scotts argued that their extended residence in free territories—Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory—entitled them to emancipation. Their case was first heard in 1847 in the St. Louis Courthouse. Though they initially lost, the case would escalate over the next decade to the U.S. Supreme Court, culminating in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which denied citizenship and legal rights to all Black people in America, free or enslaved. The ruling intensified national tensions over slavery and pushed the nation closer to civil war.
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