An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

a time they moved back to Wisconsin and then back to St. Louis. The
Emersons moved once again to Iowa, where John Emerson suddenly died in
1843. Then Irene moved back to St. Louis. In 1846, Dred and Harriet sued
their master, Irene, for their freedom. They established their case on the
basis of two statutes in Missouri. The first allowed for any person to sue for
wrongful enslavement. The second established that a person brought to a
free territory was automatically free and could not be re-enslaved. In 1847,
the Missouri court ruled against them, but they won their appeal, in 1850.
Irene Emerson then appealed the case all the way to the Missouri Supreme
Court, which ruled in 1852 in her favor. Emerson’s victory assured the
Scotts that they would be enslaved once again. Irene transferred the rights
of ownership of the Scotts to her brother, John Sanford. In 1853, Scott
appealed again to a federal court, which ruled against him, forcing him to
once again file an appeal. 36
Eventually, their case would be taken to the Supreme Court. In 1857, the
US Supreme Court ruled against them, 7–2, with Chief Justice Roger Taney
opining that enslaved Africans were not citizens. Taney wrote that, dating
back to the formation of the US republic, Africans were considered
property and not citizens nor human:
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of
an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race,
either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had
no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the
negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.
He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of
merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This
opinion was at the time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of
the white race. 37
Chief Justice Taney’s Supreme Court opinion was a white nationalist
document. What is often missed in reading the Dred Scott decision is how
Indigenous “freedom” was used as a foil to determine the “unfreedom” of
Black folks. Although Taney, like Chief Justice John Marshall before him,
conceded that “the course of events has brought Indian tribes within the
limits of the United States under subjection to the white race” and “for their
sake as well as our own, to regard them as in a state of pupilage,” he