MINNESOTA NICE
The Dred Scott Case: Once Captive and Forced to Perform Slave Labor in the North
On the soil of what is now proudly called "Minnesota Nice," one of the greatest injustices and national ruptures in U.S. history was seeded—the captivity of Dred Scott. Dred Scott was not just a name etched into legal infamy—he was a man, a husband, and a father. Born into slavery around 1799 in Virginia, Dred Scott's life spanned multiple states of bondage, culminating in a legal battle that would shake the nation to its core. His wife, Harriet Robinson Scott, was also enslaved. Together, they had two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, born into captivity under the very shadow of U.S. military power and legal hypocrisy.
Their journey to freedom began through legal channels. Harriet filed a suit for her freedom in 1846, citing the fact that she had lived with her husband in free territories—including Fort Snelling in what is now Minnesota—where slavery was strictly prohibited by the Missouri Compromise. Dred Scott filed his own suit shortly thereafter, and for nearly eleven years, their cases slowly wound their way through the courts, at times appearing hopeful.
But Minnesota’s role in this story is more than geographical. It is central and complicit. The insistence by Minnesota’s authorities—military, governmental, and judicial—that the Scotts remain enslaved on free soil reveals a long-standing precedent: to apply “freedom” unevenly, selectively, and in direct contradiction of legal codes. Scott was held at Fort Snelling, a federal outpost in a free territory, and forced to perform slave labor.
When the case ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857, the resulting decision in Scott v. Sandford shattered every remaining illusion of equality under the law for Black Americans. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney infamously declared that no Black person, free or enslaved, had any rights "which the white man was bound to respect." According to Taney, African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States. The ruling went even further, declaring it unconstitutional to bar or limit slavery anywhere in the country, striking at the very heart of any attempt to end or contain the institution.
The Dred Scott decision is widely considered the worst ruling in the history of the Supreme Court—a self-inflicted wound that ignited a five-year national revolt culminating in the U.S. Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, once retired from politics, was compelled to return, galvanized by the moral disaster of the decision. The war, a bloody reckoning over the soul of the nation, was in many ways the direct result of what began here—in Minnesota.
But the story doesn’t end in 1865.
Minnesota’s choice to enslave Dred Scott in a free territory wasn’t just a legal contradiction; it was a social and governmental template. Today, the systems that held Dred Scott in bondage echo in modern mechanisms of control and displacement. Black families in Minnesota are disproportionately confined to dangerous, over-policed neighborhoods and denied access to safe housing and public services. Regulatory protections are regularly ignored by agencies tasked with upholding them, leading to preventable medical injuries and irreversible financial harm.
When those systems fail, policing steps in as the final enforcer. Arrests and criminal charges disproportionately strip Black Minnesotans of their rights, funneling them into the criminal justice system where the 13th Amendment still allows for slavery “as punishment for crime.”
The throughline from Dred Scott to the modern-day exploitation of Black residents in Minnesota is not theoretical—it is structural, historical, and present. It is a system that has evolved, not disappeared. It is a system that learned to wear a smile. That system is what many now identify as "Minnesota Nice."
Until we reconcile with what happened to Dred Scott—not as a legal case, but as a man—his wife, and his daughters, and until we rectify how those same strategies of control are used today under the veil of legality and civility, Minnesota cannot claim progress. Because what was done to Dred Scott was not a legal abstraction. It was a life—a family—held in bondage by design. And that design, unless dismantled, continues.
Source: FortSnelling.org, Wikipedia, National Archives, and historical court records
%20(1).png)
.png)
Post a Comment