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Harriet Robinson Scott

Kathryn S Gardiner | Published on 2/9/2026

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In the language of the Dakota people, bdóte means “where two waters come together.” These waters, these bdóte, are considered sacred places of creation.

“The word can refer to any place where waters converge,” wrote photographer Monica Moses Haller in 2021. Yet, the most celebrated of these is “the meeting place where the Mnisota Wakpa (Minnesota River) and the Haháwakpa (river of the waterfalls) or Wakpá Tháŋka (great river), both known as the Mississippi River, come together. It is essential to Dakota spirituality, past and present. It is considered the center of the earth. As a Mdewakantonwan elder has taught me, this bdóte is both the center and everywhere. It is both spatially located and dispersed. And the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are built on everything that is important.”

In the early 1800s, it was at this sacred location that indigenous tribes signed treaties with the United States Government. It became the site of a frontier post during the War of 1812. In 1820, it became a more significant outpost as Fort St. Anthony, though it would soon be renamed Fort Snelling, in honor of Colonel Josiah Snelling, who oversaw its construction. In 1827, Fort Snelling became Minnesota’s first post office, though its primary use was as a prison for Native Americans and a homebase for soldiers who often brought their enslaved servants with them.

In 1858, Minnesota became the 32nd state and Fort Snelling would see nearly continuous military and detainment use through U.S. Civil War, the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, The Spanish-American War of 1898, and into World War I when it served as a hospital for wounded soldiers and those suffering from influenza. Fort Snelling was decommissioned after World War II and became Minnesota’s first National Historic Landmark in 1960. Soon after, it came under the care of the Minnesota Historical Society and the fort became part of the Fort Snelling State Park in 1962.

In 1987, Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources installed “The Wokiksuye K’a Woyuonihan (Remembering and Honoring) Memorial.” The text on a commemorative plaque reads, “This memorial honors the sixteen hundred Dakota people, many of them women and children, who were imprisoned here in the aftermath of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota Conflict. Frightened, uprooted, and uncertain of the fate of their missing relatives, the interned Dakota suffered severe hardship. At least 130 died during the cold winter months of captivity.”

Mrs. Dred Scott by Lea VanderVelde includes this map of the Minnesota area at the time Harriet Scott Robinson would have arrived as an adolescent. Fort Snelling has been circled.

Fort Snelling in modern times. Harriet spent much of her youth behind these walls. Photo courtesy Minnesota Historical Society

Decades later, Fort Snelling houses the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office and Department of Homeland Security’s detention processing center. In 2025, the decommissioned fort itself would be used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection “for parking approximately 300-500 vehicles and 10 storage trailers, a ready room space for approximal 500-800 CBP personnel, a space to house, maintain and operate five CBP Air Assets, access to a magazine to store munitions, and other necessary facilities to support operations in the Minneapolis, Minnesota metropolitan area,” as requested in an email to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which he approved.

At this writing in February 2026, the Whipple Building in Fort Snelling holds the immigrants, indigenous tribal members, and protestors detained by ICE.

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Harriet Robinson was born in Virginia around 1815. Or perhaps it was around 1820 in Pennsylvania. The stories vary not only because of the scarcity of 200-year-old records, but because Harriet was born enslaved to enslaved parents. The man who claimed ownership of Harriet was Major Lawrence Taliaferro (pronounced “Tolliver”), an agent with the U.S. Indian Agency, who was tasked with monitoring trade between indigenous tribes and the government.

Harriet’s earliest years can only be peeked at between the lines of Lawrence’s daily and meticulously kept journals. In her book Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier, legal historian and Iowa College of Law professor Lea VanderVelde examined Lawrence’s diaries and offered suppositions as to where Harriet may have been and what she may have been doing. He referred to his slaves as “servants” in his journals, so Harriet was probably among those “servants.” When he traveled, Harriet likely traveled with him.

We can be sure that, while Harriet was still just a teenager, Lawrence moved to Fort Snelling and took her with him. “When Harriet Robinson arrived at Fort Snelling, she entered a distinct, albeit small subculture encompassing people of African descent. Several officers at the Fort, many of the French fur traders, and the Indian Agents had slaves of African descent,” wrote Lea and co-author Sandhya Subramanian in a 1997 issue of The Yale Journal.

Fort Snelling stands on a bdóte of “past and present,” and this was true in the matter of slavery. Owning human beings was never legal in the area we know as Minnesota. It was initially prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, then again in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. This prohibition would be formally enshrined when Minnesota became a state in 1858, well before the Emancipation Proclamation would outlaw slavery across the nation in 1863. But various governors over the years, themselves supporters of slavery, never enforced the ordinances. As such, young Harriet found herself working, enslaved, in a free state.

The land surrounding the bdóte was difficult, cold, and remote in the 1830s and ‘40s. At Fort Snelling, Harriet’s world was small. “Inside the fort’s high stone walls one only knew as much of the season as the color of the sky and the snow that fell,” Lea described. “The fort balanced at the crown of the bluff, linking water, stone, and sky, but the high stone walls blinded residents to the spectacular view. Harriet could only glimpse the world beyond the walls when she climbed the rickety stairs of the latrine to empty the families’ chamber pots over the fort’s wall.”

While living at the fort, Harriet met an enslaved man many years her senior, a man called Etheldred. He would later come to be known as Dred Scott.

The life of an enslaved person on the frontier differed from those elsewhere in the country. While plantation slaves cultivated and harvested crops for the profit and idleness of their masters, frontier slaves worked to keep homes insulated, to keep everyone fed, to mend worn clothing, and fortify community resources. They did not experience freedom, but the work was more communal, more necessary for their own survival as well as their master’s. On the frontier, especially in a place like Fort Snelling, everyone had to work to endure.

“His experience was more typical of southern slaves,” Lea wrote of Dred. “Prior to arriving at a frontier fort, he lived in Virginia, Alabama, and the slave city of St. Louis; he had been married and lost his wife to sale; and he himself had been sold from his family of origin into the service of Dr. John Emerson.”

In 1836 or 1837, Harriet married Dred in a ceremony officiated by Lawrence.

“We cannot know whether Harriet Robinson loved Etheldred, but she later came to care for him.” Lea noted that a young woman in Harriet’s position had many good reasons to marry besides affection. “At the very least, marriage offered Harriet some security, protection, and a degree of independence. Taken to the frontier as an adolescent, she may have experienced the sexual vulnerability that threatened many enslaved women. She found an older protector in Dred. Given their ages, he could have been her father. In marrying him, she entered not only his protectorate but that of his master, Dr. Emerson.”

Harriet Scott Robinson in 1857. Public domain.

Lawrence wrote in his journals that he “gave” Harriet to Dred.

Harriet and Dred traveled south with the Emersons to St. Louis. The Scott family was often carried back and forth between St. Louis and Fort Snelling, then sometimes to Fort Jesup in Louisiana, and possibly as far as Florida. Harriet and Dred’s first child was even born on a steamboat in 1838. The couple would have four children, though only two daughters—Eliza and Lizzie—would survive to adulthood.

In 1843, John Emerson died. His property, including people, fell to the management of his widow Irene. She settled in St. Louis, and frequently rented out Harriet and Dred for labor.

This “slave city” was a different world for Harriet. She’d spent nearly half her life in a state where slavery was technically illegal, but in Missouri, to even speak of abolition was illegal.

From the desolate frontier to the crowded city, “[w]ithin these primitive slave quarters, Harriet had to find a place to cushion her toddler, Eliza,” Lea said. “As adults, she and Dred could fend for themselves, but her child’s very survival depended on her watchful eyes. The first-time mother probably devised novel ways to keep the two-year-old from harm while [her] own daily attention and energies were demanded for work. But the fireplace, boiling kettles, hot coals, and the sharp wood ax were only a few of the hazards her toddler could encounter. Now Harriet had to protect Eliza from the cruelties of race slavery as well.”

The couple lived just blocks from the courthouse, and the frequent slave auctions. Lea described the scene that played on repeat within walking distance of the young family’s home:

“Prospective customers poked and prodded the persons to be sold. Potential buyers thrust their fingers in the mouths of confined individuals and examined their teeth as if they were horses. Adult men and women could be ordered to strip naked for inspection. There were few bids for slaves who were too old to work. Owners blackened the elderly slaves’ heads with dye or plucked out their gray hairs to conceal age. Slaves offered for sale were coached to appear lively and happy while on view. This puppet show of frenetic animation masked the true tragedy of slave lives and obscured the fact that their family ties were being severed without their consent and against their will. Slaves had no ability to resist or direct the sales. Owners expected them to participate in their own sales by personally describing—bragging if they would—their initiative, skills, and abilities. Afterward, collections of purchased people were coffled together for transport to their destinations. Those who stumbled or could not walk were simply dragged along mercilessly with the rest.”

Harriet worked for a wealthy family in town, doing their laundry and their cooking. She settled into city life, now with baby Lizzie alongside Eliza, and without her husband. Dred had been pulled away when the man renting him went off with the military in the Mexican-American War. He would return two years later, unharmed and with a little money saved away.

With that money, Dred wanted to purchase his freedom from Irene Emerson. He’d even found a soldier to vouch for him and insure he’d pay off the debt. Irene refused, and if the slave owner didn’t want to sell, that ended the negotiation.

Lea hypothesized that Irene didn’t care much to keep Dred, now almost 50 years old and in poor health. Indeed, the circumstance of people abandoning their elderly slaves to “fend for themselves” was such a problem that Missouri had created a statute against it. But “[i]f Mistress Irene let Dred buy his freedom, her tenuous claim to Harriet and the children would be still weaker. ... Eliza and Lizzie’s entire productive lives lay before them. To maintain a claim of control over the Scotts’ children, Mrs. Emerson had to keep control of Harriet.”

In 1846, Dred and Harriet sued for their freedom.

Why now? Lea argued that the answer for that was also their daughters. Escaping with two children, one of whom was barely a toddler, seemed impossible. Meanwhile, 8-year-old Eliza was at an age where she could be sold away from them entirely. In “Girls at the Intersection of Age, Race, and Gender: Dred Scott’s Daughters,” Barbara Bennett Woodhouse laid out how gender was a compounding risk within the system of slavery. “Had Eliza been sold downriver, her sexuality would have been included in her economic value, which treated every form of the female slave’s labor, including childbirth, as an asset to the master. Subject to being abused by white men, and ‘bred’ to black men not of their own choosing, unable to nurse or keep the babies to whom they had given birth, and conscripted to nurse and tend the master’s legitimate offspring, females in slavery experienced a different and even more profound form of sexual oppression than males.”

They filed separately, so Harriet Robinson Scott—usually marked as “Harriet, Of Color”—and Dred Scott became two of hundreds of “freedom suits,” the name given to filings by the enslaved suing for their freedom.

Harriet was most likely the driving force behind this, Lea said. Dred would later call the court cases “a heap of trouble.” Harriet, on the other hand, “fit the profile of freedom litigants better than did Dred, since most freedom suits filed in the St. Louis courts were initiated by women. Men could run. They could take the risk of depending on their own wits, physical stamina, and speed. Men’s chances of successfully escaping were better, particularly if they traveled alone. Running with children was doomed to fail. Moreover, most of the women, like Harriet, were mothers with children. Women frequently invoked as their reason for suit that a sale threatened to separate them from their children. Filing suit preserved the maternal tie during its proceeding.”

This would prove to be a long, slow process. The first issue was discerning who, exactly, they were supposed to sue. They could not sue the city of St. Louis or the state of Missouri, nor the U.S. Government. Freedom suits were not matters of morality but of property: They had to sue the person claiming to own them. Irene had been acting as such, but was her name on the documents? What legal documents had John Emerson left after his death? As a woman Irene had little legal power of her own and had to defer to her father and brother in most things.

In 1857, following the Supreme Court’s decision in her husband’s case, white newsmen eventually convinced a mistrustful Harriet to bring Dred and their daughters to sit for daguerreotypes. These would appear in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Harriet and Dred were confined to jail, released only when hired out to earn money that would not be paid to them but to the court or to Irene. Their daughters were likely cared for by friends elsewhere in the city, but sometimes, they lived in the jail, too.

“[I]t’s likely that Eliza, now nine, and Lizzie, three or four years old, accompanied them to jail at least temporarily, since small children were imprisoned with their slave parents,” Lea wrote. “For warmth, each cell had only a dirty buffalo robe, which lay on the stone floor. It was on this musky fur bed that Harriet must have put her daughters to sleep if they were confined with her.” Dred was kept in a separate cell.

For the first stages, both Dred Scott v. Irene Emerson and Harriet Scott v. Irene Emerson moved through the city courts, slowed by changing lawyers, legal minutia, and even an outbreak of cholera that brought the city to a stop. In January 1850, Harriet and Dred won their cases; Irene was found guilty of imprisoning them. For a fleeting moment, they were free, but Irene soon appealed the verdict, and the court proceedings started all over again.

Harriet and Dred would remain free until the next trial, though this “freedom” could not have felt secure nor safe. The city was largely hostile to free Black people, calling their population “The Negro Problem” and debating daily in the newspapers if they should all be sent to Africa or if freeing them simply shouldn’t be allowed in the first place.

“[O]n February 12, 1850, an agreement was made that ‘in as much as the points and principles of law to be decided [in the two cases were] identical, only Dred Scott v. Irene Emerson would be advanced, and any determination in that case would apply to Harriet’s suit as well,” according to Walter Ehrlich in They Have No Rights: Dred Scott’s Struggle for Freedom.

In the over one hundred years since, many legal scholars have called this the case’s fatal flaw. Lea called it a “blunder.” As noted, Harriet already better fit the profile of a freedom litigant, and she also had better legal grounds to believe herself free. Not only had she lived a larger percentage of her life in a free state, recall how Lawrence said he “gave” Harriet to Dred after their marriage at Fort Snelling.

“Every indication suggests that Taliaferro relinquished claim to her services, but did he sell her to Dr. Emerson? His own statement, recorded long after the event, was that he gave her to Dred, Emerson’s slave, or former slave, while in free territory,” Lea recounted. “There is no evidence in either his contemporary papers or Emerson’s suggesting an attempted sale. More important, even if there had been evidence of an attempted sale, the sale of a human being in free territory where slavery was abolished would have been illegal, either void or voidable anyway.”

Also, the legal status of children was decided by the status of the mother. Dred’s freedom would have no impact on Eliza or Lizzie. Only Harriet’s freedom could free her daughters.

For the case’s second hearing in 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in favor of Irene, contradicting the standard set by the Missouri Compromise in 1820. They essentially said that, since Dred had not gained freeing documents while in a free state, he became a slave again the moment he stepped into Missouri.

Here again, Lea argued, Harriet’s case was made of stronger stuff. “Harriet had never been a Missouri slave prior to her arrival in 1840. Taliaferro was a civilian government agent rather than an officer under military orders, so he was not under the same obligation to take his slaves to free territory with him that the state supreme court had posited for Dr. Emerson. Taliaferro had affirmatively expressed an intention to free some of his slaves while in Minnesota, and he had acted accordingly by relinquishing his claim to Harriet and giving her away in marriage. None of these facts were raised because of the lawyers’ stipulation to resolve her claim according to Dred’s outcome.”

This ruling was a setback, not only for Harriet and Dred, but for all the freedom litigants still waiting for their day in court. A vicious precedent had been set, and more were to come.

“While the Scotts worked at whatever low-skilled jobs they could get, the children grew into adolescence and went into hiding,” Lea wrote. Eliza and Lizzie could still be stolen and sold into slavery at any moment. “Their parents knew where they were and presumably could contact them surreptitiously, but it was safter for them to be out of reach of the law. One often hides that which one values most.”

The Scotts appealed, seeking a third hearing, but this time suing John A. Sanford, Irene’s brother. This is also of some legal befuddlement and speculation. Irene never appeared in court or testified; she’d been nearly invisible through all the proceedings and had since remarried. After the death of Irene’s father, John handled all legal matters for his sister—indeed, he had been bankrolling the previous suits—but he never owned Harriet nor Dred. Just the same, John made no effort to avoid the legal battle. In fact, he seemed eager to take it on. A wealthy businessman himself, he was perhaps motivated by a chance to strike a blow for slave owners.

And he would succeed in doing so. In the spring of 1854, Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford (the court misspelled his name) went to the U.S. Supreme Court. It was decided on March 6, 1857, with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney writing for the majority that Black people, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.”

The ruling also declared The Missouri Compromise and the Northwest Territorial Ordinance unconstitutional because they interfered with a citizen’s right to property—that is, their right to own other human beings. Dred’s case had been rooted largely in the freedom presumed by those documents, so the Court took the opportunity to nullify those documents outright.

In a 1968 article titled “Was the Dred Scott Case Valid?” Walter summed up the case. “It was based upon the relationship between an alleged master and an alleged slave, but the alleged master was not the master and the alleged slave was not his slave—and yet the decision of the Supreme Court was to play a most significant role in bringing about the Civil War.”

The ruling sparked outrage, fuel to the fire in an already divided nation heading toward war against itself. Newspaper reporters came to their door to interview Dred. Journalists turned their investigative skills to the question “Who owns Dred Scott?” He was depicted as humble, respectful, and knowledgeable about his case, a victim of the legal system. The negative press was so intense that, by summer, Dred, Harriet, and their daughters were freed.

“Ultimately, Dred, Harriet, Eliza, and Lizzie were freed not by declaration of law in in any of the state or federal courts where they had pursed their freedom,” Lea wrote. “They were declared free as a consequence of the fact that their loss publicly embarrassed the Massachusetts congressmen [Irene’s new husband Calvin Chaffee] to whom their ownership had devolved.”

The family at last reunited; Eliza and Lizzie returned to their parents. Dred received a job offer from Theron Barnum, cousin of circus tycoon P.T. Barnum, to work as a doorman at Barnum’s St. Louis Hotel, a six-floor hotel near the Mississippi River. Too unwell to do much doorman work, Dred was mainly a celebrity meet-and-greet attraction.

“Harriet seemed satisfied with obscurity and repose,” Lea said. “She simply wanted to be left alone, to care for her aging husband and finally enjoy her daughters’ company in peace and security. Observers perceived her as neat, industrious, and devotedly attached to her husband and children, an acceptable member of the Baptist Church. She took in laundry.”

Dred died of tuberculosis on Sept. 17, 1858, shy of 60 years old. Harriet disappeared from public view until her own death 18 years later on June 17, 1876. The paper’s called her “Dred’s widow.”

Dred was buried at Calvary Cemetery, the middle grave of three plots purchased by his first owner. “Harriet could never have hoped to join him in his final resting place,” Lea noted, “as the extra grave plots were open to separate the famous black man’s grave from the adjoining plots for white people.” Some sources indicate she was buried at the historic Greenwood Cemetery in St. Louis.

"We tend not to see women as actors in history; we tend not to see black people as actors in history; and we tend not to see slaves as actors in history," Lea said in an interview. "Here's a woman who was all three and who affected history enormously: she triggered a lawsuit that changed history."

Sources:

Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier by Lea VanderVelde

Maryland.gov: Law professor shines light on ‘Mrs. Dred Scott’

Yale Law Journal: Mrs. Dred Scott by Lea Vandervelde and Sandhya Subramanian

Located and Dispersed by Monica Moses Haller
They Have No Rights: Dred Scott’s Struggle for Freedom by Walter Ehrlich

Minnesota Historical Society: Historic Fort Snelling

MSN: Exclusive: Hegseth approves request by leaders of Minneapolis immigration siege for use of military base

Bring me the News: Minnesota Historical Society closes Fort Snelling as ICE raids continue in Minnesota

ICT News: Former Native American concentration camp lies beneath current immigration detention center

KSTP.com: ICE protestor detained in Fort Snelling shares detention experience

ABC News: Oglala Sioux Tribe says three tribal members arrested in Minneapolis are in ICE detention

Wikipedia: Fort Snelling, Harriet Robinson Scott, Dred Scott, Dakota War of 1862, Fort Snelling State Park, Lawrence Taliaferro, History of slavery in Minnesota

African American Registry: Harriet Robinson Scott, Abolitionist born

Dred Scott Lives: Harriet Scott

Black Past: Harriet Robinson Scott (ca. 1820-1876)

National Park Service: Harriet Robinson Scott

The Journal of American History: Was the Dred Scott Case Valid? by Walter Ehrlich

Historic Missourians: Harriet Robinson Scott

The New York Historical: Life Story: Harriet Robinson Scott (ca. 1815-1876)

Oyez: Dred Scott v. Sandford

University of Michigan Library: Dred Scott v. Sandford

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Tragedy of Children’s Rights from Ben Franklin to Lionel Tate – Chapter 4: Girls at the Intersection of Age, Race, and Gender: Dred Scott’s Daughters by Barbara Bennett Woodhouse

Find a Grave: Harriet Robinson Scott

The Dred Scott Heritage Foundation

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