Scott descendant to keynote at RootsTech 2024
There’s often reason for a bit of skepticism over the selection of most keynoters at RootsTech, the huge annual genealogy conference in Salt Lake City.
It’s often more a matter of celebrity than genealogy or family history.
But the announcement today of one of the keynoters for the 2024 RootsTech has The Legal Genealogist dancing in the aisles.
History, family, stories of America’s past — come to life, in the person of Lynne M. Jackson, author, educator and lifelong St. Louis resident, revealed today as the first announced keynoter for the upcoming conference, scheduled for February 29 through March 2, 2024.1
And the living breathing legacy of one of the turning points in American history.
Lynne M. Jackson — who will keynote on Friday, March 1, 2024 — is President and founder of the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation.
Yes, that Dred Scott.
The Dred Scott who — with his wife Harriet and their two children Eliza and Lizzie — was at the center of the 1857 decision generally regarded as the single worst decision ever of the United States Supreme Court: the decision that no person of African descent, whose ancestors were brought to America enslaved, could be a citizen of the United States, entitled to the privileges of citizenship including the right to sue in court for recognition of freedom.2 The decision was worse than that: it also held that longstanding bars on the spread of slavery into the territories were unlawful.3
The case history is astounding. The National Archives describes it this way:
In 1846, an enslaved Black man named Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court. They claimed that they were free due to their residence in a free territory where slavery was prohibited.
The odds were in their favor. They had lived with their enslaver, an army surgeon, at Fort Snelling, then in the free Territory of Wisconsin. The Scotts’ freedom could be established on the grounds that they had been held in bondage for extended periods in a free territory and were then returned to a slave state. Courts had ruled this way in the past.
However, what appeared to be a straightforward lawsuit between two private parties became an 11-year legal struggle that culminated in one of the most notorious decisions ever issued by the United States Supreme Court. Scott lost his case, which worked its way through the Missouri state courts; he then filed a new federal suit which ultimately reached the Supreme Court.
On its way to the Supreme Court, the Dred Scott case grew in scope and significance as slavery became the single most explosive issue in American politics. By the time the case reached the high court, it had come to have enormous political implications for the entire nation.
On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the majority opinion of the Court, which stated that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts. The opinion also stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a federal territory. This decision moved the nation a step closer to the Civil War.
The decision of Scott v. Sandford, considered by many legal scholars to be the worst ever rendered by the Supreme Court, was overturned by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and declared all persons born in the United States to be citizens of the United States.4
So… what happened to Dred and Harriet Scott? To their two children named with them in the court papers? What’s the significance of the case, the history, this family?
This keynote speaker will share with us details of the Scotts’ personal and family history that have not previously been known.
We’re going to hear about it from a very personal perspective.
Because Lynne M. Jackson is the great-great-granddaughter of Dred and Harriet Scott.
Don’t miss this keynote. Friday, March 1, 2024.
In person and online.
At RootsTech 2024.
I can’t wait.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Living legacy of Dred Scott,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 30 Oct 2023).
SOURCES
- No, that’s not a typo. 2024 is a leap year. ↩
- See Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). ↩
- Ibid., at 452 (“the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void”). ↩
- “Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857),” Milestone Documents, U.S. National Archives (https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/ : accessed 30 Oct 2023). ↩
Thank you for giving us the backstory on this keynote speaker and the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation… I’ll look forward to attending this special session!
I’m commenting from the UK so I have a somewhat different perspective. This Supreme Court and consitutional case was unknown to me and so many thanks for blogging about it. I’ve been researching my family history for several years now, and more recently the history of my church and of East Africa. I’ve been shocked at how many lnks I’ve found to slavery. With the Atlantic slave trade so deeply embedded in US history as well as UK history, the breadth of examples have surprised me.
In 1680 my church in the north-west of England raised what would be the modern equivalent of about $8500 to buy English slaves back from the Barbary pirates who had raided them.
A little earlier, when King Charles II was restored to the throne after the execution of his father and the short-lived republic, while some of those who were involved in the execution were themselves executed, others became slaves and were sent to Barbados and Jamaica.
Much more recently I’ve come across a very distant relative who was involved in Navy patrols of the Red Sea in the 1930s to intercept slavers.
Another distant relative was sent as a missionary to freed slaves in Sierra Leone in 1819; at that time the Royal Navy was attempting to interdict the transatlantic trade. Sian Rees’ book, Sweet Waters and Bitter, is an interesting read about those times.
The East African slave trade was hard to break; I’ve been to the places in Zanzibar where slaves were held; British intervention ended the slave trade there as late as 1873. Slaves were traded to the Persian Gulf among other places.
And yes I have found distant cousins who were slave owners in Texas and in Jamaica.
Some sent to the Caribbean were Scots on the losing Jacobite side after Culloden. They were sent with the status of slaves and mostly died there due to the harsh conditions and diseases. People wondering why few minor Scottish criminals were transported to Australia are often told that with that history in mind, Scottish juries were loath to convict a criminal to transportation there unless the crime was major or one of a long repetitive chain. The behavior certainly existed, but I’m not sure if the evidence does.
No. Just no. There were no “white slaves” in large numbers treated the same way those enslaved from Africa were. It’s mythology. The Scots and Irish transported to the New World (the Americas first and then Australia) were never treated as chattel slaves. They never were enslaved for life, with their children automatically enslaved for life. That’s not to say that transportees were not treated horribly. It’s not to say they didn’t suffer horribly. It is to say that they always had one thing the African enslaved did not: hope. Hope they would survive their terms and have some life. Hope for their children. It’s a big big big difference here.
Modern day slavery still exists in various forms. It is good to look back and see that past battles have advanced the cause of human freedom. And celebrate those brave enough to take a stand.