ught by popular subscription, and ultimately became a Baptist minister
in Canada.

In 1834 Dr. Emerson, an army officer stationed in Missouri, removed to
Illinois, taking with him his slave, Dred Scott. Two years later, again
accompanied by Scott, he went to Minnesota. In Illinois slavery was
prohibited by state law and Minnesota was a free territory. In 1838
Emerson returned with Scott to Missouri. After a while the slave raised
the important question: Had not his residence outside of a slave state
made him a free man? Beaten by his master in 1848, with the aid of
anti-slavery lawyers Scott brought a suit against him for assault and
battery, the circuit court of St. Louis rendering a decision in his
favor. Emerson appealed and in 1852 the Supreme Court of the state
reversed the decision of the lower court. Not long after this Emerson
sold Scott to a citizen of New York named Sandford. Scott now brought
suit against Sandford, on the ground that they were citizens of
different states. The case finally reached the Supreme Court of the
United States, which in 1857 handed down the decision that Scott was not
a citizen of Missouri and had no standing in the Federal courts, that
a slave was only a piece of property, and that a master might take his
property with impunity to any place within the jurisdiction of the
United States. The ownership of Scott and his family soon passed to a
Massachusetts family by whom they were liberated; but the important
decision that the case had called forth aroused the most intense
excitement throughout the country, and somehow out of it all people
remembered more than anything else the amazing declaration of Chief
Justice Taney that "the Negroes were so far inferior that they had
no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The extra-legal
character and the general fallacy of his position were exposed by
Justice Curtis in a masterly dissenting opinion.

No one incident of the period showed more clearly the tension under
which the country was laboring than the assault on Charles Sumner by
Preston S. Brooks, a congressional representative from South Carolina.
As a result of this regrettable occurrence splendid canes with such
inscriptions as "Hit him again" and "Use knock-down arguments" were sent
to Brooks from different parts of the South and he was triumphantly
reelected by his constituency, while on the other hand resolutions
denouncing him were passed all over the North, in Canada,