Slave lawsuits were common in Missouri from the 1820's through the 1850's. The slaves usually won before all-white juries. So, Dred and Harriet Scott realistically felt they would win, too. They also won freedom before an all-white jury, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed that decision. So, the Scotts sued in federal court, where they lost, definitively, the Supreme Court declaring "we the people of the United States" did not include any blacks, slave or free, within its meaning; it also said that blacks were so lowly regarded that blacks had no rights that whites were bound to respect, being no more than chattel. This declaration of law led John Brown, a fierce white, Christian freedom fighter, to lead a caravan of slaves from Missouri to Canada successfully; and to travel through New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and other states, recruiting volunteers and raising funds for his heroic raid on the federal Harper's Ferry Armory in Virginia in 1859, by which he had hoped to acquire arms for slave revolts down the spine of the Allegheny Mountains. He failed and was hung. But, Scotts' lawsuit and Brown's raid, helped to launch the Civil War's freedom.
On this date in 1857, the Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, declaring no African Americans, freed or slaves, could ever be citizens.
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