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Dred and Harriet Scott

A Family's Struggle for Freedom

Gwenyth Swain

STATUS: AVAILABLE
$22.95, cloth, ISBN 0-87351-482-3
$12.95, paper, ISBN 0-87351-483-1
112 pp., 27 b&w illus., glossary, chronology, notes, bibliography, index
SUBJECT: Biography/Children - Middle Readers (ages 9 and up)

Phone Orders: 1-800-621-2736

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BOOK EXCERPT

Introduction

Children are precious. Every parent knows that. Yet slaves in America were never really free to hold onto their children. They couldn't keep their babies close to them. Slave babies belonged not to their parents, but to Master.

When a slave mother went to work in the fields at harvest-time, when all hands were needed, she laid her baby down under a tree or under a bush alongside the field. She hoped the shade held until noontime. That's when she would be allowed to hold and feed and comfort her baby again.

When a slave father drove his master's carriage into town, he worried about the young child he left behind at the master's big house. He hoped the child wouldn't get into trouble. Elderly slaves often looked after the youngest slave children, but boys and girls as young as four or five were put to work. They ran errands, took water to other slaves working in the fields, or helped look after younger children.

It's likely that Dred Scott's first job was looking after a baby. A white baby, the son of his master. Fan the flies away from him. Keep him from crying. Watch for when he wets his diaper. All these things a slave boy of four or five could do.

Years later Dred asked for help from "them boys he was raised with," the Blow boys, sons of his master, Peter Blow. He asked them to help him fight for his freedom--and for the freedom of his wife, Harriet, and their children, Eliza and Lizzie.

That fight has a name: the Dred Scott Decision. The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., made the decision about Dred's freedom in 1857. The verdict divided this country. Many think it helped to bring about a bloody, bloody war between the southern and the northern states.

Historians say the Court's decision was all about states' rights, citizenship rights, and a host of other big and important ideas. But to Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott, it was simple. It was about children. It was about how precious their daughters were to them. It was about a dream Dred and Harriet had.

They dreamed that their children--the daughters of slaves--would live free.