Missouri

When you think of the Network to Freedom – the Underground Railroad – the states that first come to mind are Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, not Missouri. A slave state that petitioned for Statehood in 1818, its original residents were the generation that struck out for the inexpensive land opened with the Louisiana Purchase in 1804.  Virginia would give birth to the State of Kentucky, with a huge exodus of slave owners seeking new land after the War of 1812. Their petition for Statehood would literally light the long fuse to the Civil War, culminating in the Missouri Compromise. But that in itself would only hold for so long and then be overturned by 1850. The tide had turned, and those cases for freedom that had petitioned for freedom under the right of once free, always free fell with the Supreme Court’s decision after the Dred Scott decision.

The original petition for freedom had been filed by Harriet Scott, Dred’s wife, in hopes that by her resistance to slavery, her daughters would be able to grow up in freedom. Her and her husband’s cases went on for years, with the famous decision coming in 1857 that they were not people, but property. They had no rights, no citizenship, or freedom. The very rights our country had been founded on. This Supreme Court decision would only make the fuse burn hotter. The Courthouse where the case was filed was in St. Louis, Missouri, and was listed on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom in 1998 when Congress established the program with the National Park System (under the Department of the Interior). Today there are 14 listings in the St. Louis Region for the National Underground Railroad. September is National Underground Railroad Month. For more about the 800+ listings, see https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1205/index.htm