Who Was Dred Scott

Dred Scott returns to San Francosco's KFOG

Dred Scott: Picturing a Nineteenth Century Icon

This article addresses the visual image of Dred Scott in the public imagination particularly through the photographic portrait of Scott made in 1857. Limited by the not yet developed technology to print photographs in newspapers, this photograph was not published when the landmark 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford defined African Americans as separate from and unequal to the citizenry that constituted the national body. In response to Dred Scott’s resistance to enslavement Chief Justice Taney’s decision that African Americans “were not intended to be included under the word ‘citizens’ in the constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States” clarified that regardless of status as slave or free, African Americans were marked by their Blackness as property of the nation state. Scott’s image was mediated to the public through an engraving based on the original photograph. In my analysis I return to the photograph and the published engraved portrait, and discuss the roles they played in the interpretation of the Dred Scott case and African American identity in the mid-nineteenth century.

by Bridget R. Cooks, PhD

The opportunity to control one’s own image through photography and indeed one’s own story was of particular significance for African Americans in the 1850s. While still in its technological infancy, photography had been used against Black slaves to provide scientific evidence of their own supposed inhumanity. Because of this contemporary abuse of the daguerreotype and Scott’s assertion to the court that he was not property but human and therefore deserving of freedom, the Scott photograph was poised to interrupt this force of photography that sought to frame and capture the Black body. The ability to exercise one’s agency over the photographer, and his apparatus, partially determined the manipulation of the viewer’s reaction to the resulting image. For Scott having agency in the studio could affect the response of the American public to the outcome of his case and ultimately affect the fate of slavery in America. Dissemination of his image aided in the public reception of his case and has dictated the way in which we remember Scott as an African American activist and icon. The image of Dred Scott that exists in the popular consciousness is one of two images: the 1857 engraving of Scott, and the 1888 painting by Louis Schultze.

I, Dred Scott, a fictional slave narrative based on the life and legal precedent of Dred Scott

Dred Scott, Person Or Property?

Dred Scott v. Sandford, a brief history with documents

Dred Scott and the problem of constitutional evil

Dred Scott's Revenge, A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America