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SALT LAKE CITY — It was 1995 when Lynne Jackson, the great-great-granddaughter of Dred and Harriet Scott, heard a prompting from God.
"You should study Dred Scott," Jackson recalled hearing. "And I said out loud, 'Yeah, you know, I should know more than the average person.'" What began as an inquiry into the past about her ancestors morphed into a story of reconciliation that Jackson told at the 13th annual RootsTech conference held at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City on Friday.
Jackson started studying.
"None of us really understood until the 150th anniversary how courageous and how amazing our ancestors really were to do what they did all those many years ago," Jackson said.
Dred and Harriet Scott were enslaved people who initially sought to buy their freedom for $300 from their enslaver's widow. After the widow Irene Emerson rejected the offer, the Scotts took to the courts. After years of fighting his case in court, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in 1852 that Scott could not be freed from slavery. The U.S. Circuit Court upheld this decision in 1854 and it was then that Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Roger Taney handed down the court's decision in 1857. The court had ruled against Scott and stated that enslaved persons were not U.S. citizens, could not be citizens and could not sue in federal court for their freedom. It's widely considered one of the most infamous decisions in Supreme Court history.
"Their case was a major catalyst for the Civil War," Jackson said.
But in Jackson's life, learning about her ancestors and the court case that bears the Scott name also led to a profound moment of reconciliation with the ancestors of the man who issued that infamous Supreme Court decision.
Charles Taney III, a great-great-great-nephew of the chief justice who wrote the decision in Scott's case, stood outside the Maryland State House in 2017. Behind him was a statue of his ancestor judge.
"Apologizing to the Scotts for the Dred Scott decision is like bringing a Band-Aid to an amputation. It's right and necessary to apologize, but what's important now is what actions we can all take," Taney told the Baltimore Sun. His decision to apologize came after he studied the Dred Scott case and began working with Jackson.
Jackson said the work of commemoration and reconciliation did not stop there. After Scott's death, only a year after the Supreme Court decision, a Jesuit priest who later discovered that Scott was buried in an unmarked grave said at the time: "Then if someone someday wants to put up a better monument it will at least be known where Dred Scott lies."
"It had always been in my heart that people should know him and the marker did not say much," Jackson said at RootsTech. She began putting into motion a 9-feet tall monument for Dred Scott to mark the grave.
When Scott was buried, Jackson said, it was necessary to purchase three plots "because back then you could not bury a Black person next to a white person."
Jackson is looking forward to commemorating Dred Scott in other ways. "It's been 18 years and I can only tell you the journey has been a miracle," she said, noting that she and the foundation are currently working to get a U.S. postage stamp of Dred Scott.
More to Scott's story
While the Supreme Court ruling did not result in the Scotts' freedom, the historical record shows that Dred and Harriet Scott were emancipated a couple months later by different means.
Emerson, who came to own the Scotts after her husband's death, ended up remarrying a man named Calvin Chaffee, a Massachusetts congressman who was also an abolitionist. According to the Missouri State Archives, after Chaffee discovered his wife owned slaves, he made an effort to emancipate the Scotts by immediately transferring ownership to a resident of St. Louis named Taylor Blow, since Missouri law only permitted citizens of Missouri "to emancipate a slave" in the state.
Blow moved to emancipate the Scotts, and Judge Alexander Hamilton signed papers officially freeing Dred and Harriet Scott on May 26, 1857. Dred Scott died a little more than a year later.
Education is easy for itself, but reconciliation is a very powerful thing that we do.
–Lynne Jackson, Dred Scott's great-great-granddaughter
But the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford had ripple effects across the U.S. for years and years to come.
At the time of the ruling, Abraham Lincoln vocally opposed the decision as he campaigned for Senate in a series of debates against his opponent Stephen Douglas. These debates helped propel Lincoln to the White House.
Finding her roots
In 2006, Jackson started the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision. "From that we decided that commemoration, education and reconciliation would be our pillars."
Outside the old courthouse in St. Louis where it all started, the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation, the National Parks Service and sculptor Harry Weber have placed statues for both Dred and Harriet Scott. But the work of education and reconciliation continues as Jackson retells the story of her ancestors.
At the unveiling ceremony of those statues, the Pastor Ronald Bobo led an invocation praising the "brave actions" of Dred and Harriet Scott that "set in motion the presidential candidacy of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War and three amendments to the United States Constitution."
Dred Scott Madison, Jr., cousin of Jackson, said about her work to commemorate Dred Scott, "I have often told her she's doing God's work, and she is, just as our great-great-grandmother and grandfather did. They dared to defy man's law and represent God's law. This is truly a nation under God, something that could never have been while slavery was in existence."
"Education is easy for itself, but reconciliation is a very powerful thing that we do," Jackson said.
