Scott, Harriet Robinson

Source:

 African American National Biography

Scott, Harriet Robinson

(c. 1818–17 June 1876),

litigant, slave, and laundress, was born probably in Virginia to enslaved parents about whom nothing is known. By the 1830s, she had become the slave of Lawrence Taliaferro, an Indian agent and a major in the U.S. Army. When Taliaferro, a Virginian who had transplanted to Pennsylvania, was stationed at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, he brought Harriet with him. There she met Dred Scott soon after his master, Dr. John Emerson, was also posted at Fort Snelling. Though such weddings were exceedingly rare, Taliaferro, also a justice of the peace, performed a formal marriage ceremony between Scott and Robinson in 1836 or 1837. After the marriage, Harriet Scott was either given or, more likely, sold to Emerson.

Emerson hired the Scotts out to various officers at Fort Snelling before he married Irene Sanford on 6 February 1838. After a brief period at the Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Emerson was transferred to Louisiana's Fort Jessup. The Scotts accompanied him to both postings, but another transfer brought them back to Fort Snelling in October 1838. It was during this period that the Scotts’ daughter Eliza was born—reportedly onboard the ship taking the Scotts to Fort Snelling. When Emerson was transferred again—this time to Florida—his wife and the Scotts settled in St. Louis on the estate of Irene Sanford Emerson's father. A second daughter, Lizzie, as well as two sons who died in infancy, were born during this period, and evidence shows that both Dred Scott (as a porter/valet) and Harriet Scott (as a laundress/domestic) were hired out in the St. Louis area. When Emerson died of consumption on 29 December 1843, the Scotts’ title passed to Irene Emerson. Dred Scott reportedly attempted to purchase himself and his family but found his mistress unwilling.

For reasons that are still unclear, both Harriet and Dred Scott filed individual suits for their freedom on 6 April 1846; both cited their extended time in free territory as the central grounds. Recent scholars have argued, based on the circumstances surrounding most St. Louis freedom suits, that Harriet Scott may actually have instigated the action, perhaps with the aid of her minister, John R. Anderson. She may have acted, like other slave women who filed such suits, to obtain freedom for her daughters. Regardless, the Scotts had by this time built a number of connections among St. Louis's black communities—ties that would likely have led them to the attorney Francis Butter Murdoch, who was the most active representative of slaves suing for freedom in St. Louis in the 1840s. Murdoch, though, worked with the Scotts only briefly, as did their second attorney, C. D. Drake. When the Scotts’ third attorney, Samuel Bay, took the case to trial in June of 1847 before Judge Alexander Hamilton, the Scotts initially lost—but Bay filed a motion for a new trial based on a technicality. That new trial, held in January of 1850 with the Scotts now represented by Alexander Field and David Hall, resulted in a victory for the Scotts. For the moment, they were technically free. Like many of the slaves who filed freedom suits, though, the Scotts had been hired out through the sheriff's office for much of the time since they had filed papers—with the understanding that they would receive their wages if they won, and their owner would receive the wages if they lost. Perhaps because of this and perhaps simply because of the value of the Scotts, Irene Emerson immediately appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, but, by an agreement of all parties made on 12 February 1850, only Dred Scott's case went forward, with the understanding that Harriet's fate would follow her husband's. Ironically, contemporary legal scholars suggest that Harriet actually had stronger grounds for her freedom suit because, in addition to the time in Minnesota she shared with her husband, she also had an extended residence with Taliaferro in Pennsylvania.

In a surprising reversal of several years of precedent, on 22 March 1852, in a 2 to 1 verdict, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against Scott. At this point Irene Emerson, now the wife of Calvin Chaffee (soon to be a Massachusetts congressman elected on an antislavery platform), seems to have transferred ownership of the Scotts to her brother John F. A. Sanford, who was named as the defendant when the Scotts’ friends (especially the Blow family, who had been early owners of Dred Scott) and new attorney Roswell Field moved the case to the U.S. federal court system in November of 1853. The Scotts lost again, but Field appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court at the end of 1854. Now fully based on Dred's case alone, the Scotts’ fate rested with the pro-southern and pro-slavery Court headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney, who heard the case (argued by friends of Field who had Washington connections Montgomery Blair and George T. Curtis) in 1856 and issued its infamous 7 to 2 ruling against Dred Scott on 6 March 1857. However, Chaffee, who played no part in the trial but whose politics would be open to question by Massachusetts voters when he came up for re-election, seems to have decided to free the Scotts. He thus transferred ownership to Taylor Blow, who emancipated Dred, Harriet, and their two daughters under a Missouri law that allowed a resident of the state to emancipate his slaves.

Dred Scott obtained a job as a porter at St. Louis's Barnum Hotel soon after—though he was, in essence, there as a curiosity for hotel guests. The Scotts took a small house off of Carr Street, and Harriet continued to work as a laundress. Dred Scott died 17 September 1858, and most of the few accounts that mention Harriet at all suggest that she died soon after. Recent scholars, though, have found evidence that she continued to work as a laundress until at least 1870 and lived in St. Louis with her daughter Lizzie, who married Wilson Madison and had two sons, Harry and John Alexander. Harriet Scott died at their home. Although she is not as well known as her husband—in large part because of the heavily gendered decision to allow his suit alone to proceed—Harriet Scott was a key figure in the nineteenth-century struggle for basic human rights for African Americans.

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