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Close Enough for State Park Historical Society Work

By Jack M. Balkin

Yesterday was my daughter's fourth grade class field trip! Not having a real job, I was able to go along. We bicycled down the Mississippi on a (rare) beautiful Minnesota spring day, to Fort Snelling. Among the presentations was a short talk about the Fort's "most famous residents," Dred and Harriet Scott. I listened with great interest -- and some amusement. Here is my rough paraphrase of the young guide's presentation. For Balkinization Fun: How many things are wrong with this picture? (Yes, you may participate even if you've written a book about the case.) :-)

" This [recreated] room is where Fort Snelling's most famous residents lived, Dred Scott and Harriet Scott. [Pictures held up.] They were slaves of Captain John Emerson, who was a surgeon. He brought them here from Missouri, which was a state that had slavery. This was Captain Emerson's kitchen, and the Scotts lived in this room, with the two daughters they had here. Those daughters became his slaves as well. Now, there weren't many options for slaves. They could run away, but they could be hunted down. But have any of you heard of the Underground Railroad? [brief discussion]. That was where people helped slaves escape to states in the north, where slavery was prohibited."

"Now Fort Snelling is in the north, but Minnesota wasn't a state yet. It was federal territory. Several years before, when Missouri was admitted as a state where slavery was permitted, Congress had passed a law saying that slavery would be illegal north of Missouri but legal south of Missouri. So Captain Emerson was breaking the law when he brought Dred and Harriet here, wasn't he?!"

"Now, when the Scotts got back to Missouri, they did something very brave. They sued the United States Government. They said that they should be free. But Missouri was a slave state. Do you think they could get a fair trial there? All the judges and the juries owned slaves! They lost their first trial. But then they appealed and had a second trial. But they lost that one too. Finally, they appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. It took 11 years! And all that time, the family was in trouble, in hiding, and in jail. Now how old are you? 10? So the case took longer than you all have been alive, and all that time the Scotts were in hiding or in jail."

"Now it took a lot of money for them to get their case to the Supreme Court. They could have bought their own freedom, but instead they spent the money to take the case to the Supreme Court, because they knew their case would affect all slaves in the whole country. Whatever the Supreme Court decided would be a new law for the whole country. But you know what happened? The Supreme Court said that slavery had to be legal everywhere [and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional]. So now there was going to be slavery everwhere, even in the northern states!"

"That led to a big war. Does anyone know what that war was called? That's right -- it was the Civil War, between the states that had slavery and the states that didn't have slavery. And after that war, which the North won, slavery was abolished by the Fourteenth Amendment."

"The Scotts lost their case, but they bought their freedom anyway [and lived happily ever after]."

I didn't want to be one of those parents -- you know the type. (Heck, maybe you are the type!) And there really was a lot of mostly-right, useful information, good for fourth graders, in the presentation. (It's not much worse than most textbooks I've seen, including several college and law school texts.) So I just sat there and smiled.

Then we went on the blacksmith shop, which was really cool. The guy made a nail, right there before our eyes! And I got to hang on to it, all the way back on the bike ride to the Dairy Queen!

Michael Stokes Paulsen

Full post as published by Balkinization on May 09, 2008 (boomark / email).