The history of slavery in Missouri began in 1720, predating statehood, with the large-scale slavery in the region, when French merchant Philippe François Renault brought about 500 slaves of African descent from Saint-Domingue up the Mississippi River to work in lead mines in what is now southeastern Missouri and southern Illinois. These were the first enslaved Africans brought in masses to the middle Mississippi River Valley. Prior to Renault's enterprise, slavery in Missouri under French colonial rule had a much smaller scale compared to elsewhere in the French colonies. Immediately prior to the American Civil War, there were about 100,000 enslaved people in Missouri, about half of whom lived in the 18 western counties near the Kansas border.
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👉 History of slavery in Missouri in the context of Dred Scott decision
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the United States Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and therefore they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. The decision is widely considered the worst in the Supreme Court's history, widely denounced for its overt racism, judicial activism, and poor legal reasoning. It de jure nationalized slavery, and thus played a crucial role in the events that led to the American Civil War four years later. Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions." Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it the Court's "greatest self-inflicted wound".
The decision involved the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved black man whose owners had taken him from Missouri, a slave-holding state, into Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal. When his owners later brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom and claimed that because he had been taken into "free" U.S. territory, he had automatically been freed and was legally no longer a slave. Scott sued first in Missouri state court, which ruled that he was still a slave under its law. He then sued in U.S. federal court, which ruled against him by deciding that it had to apply Missouri law to the case. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.