Freedom's Price (21 page)

The St. Louis levee in the mid- to late 1800s

Dred was a small man and seems to have been charming and well liked. He died of tuberculosis in September 1858, less than two years after he formally gained his freedom. He was around fifty-nine years old. His wife, Harriet, was illiterate but was most likely the driving force behind Dred Scott's lawsuit. She was a devoted churchwoman and known for her fine character. Around twenty years younger than her husband, she lived very quietly after his death, taking in laundry. In her old age, Harriet became a house servant, a less physically demanding job, until her death in June 1876 at the age of around sixty-one.

Eliza married Wilson Madison sometime before 1863. Eliza was probably around twenty-four when she married (in
Freedom's Price
, we made Eliza a little older than she was in real life in 1849). She worked as a laundress for her entire life. Wilson achieved his dream and became a pastry chef. They had six children, but only two sons survived, Harry and John. Wilson died in May 1881 at age forty-three, and Eliza died the next year. She was also forty-three.

Lizzie Scott's life was a bit of a mystery. She never married,
and even though she lived in St. Louis, she seemed to have lost touch with her family. After Eliza's death, her sons Harry and John (ages twelve and nine) were orphaned. According to family lore, the two boys sat on a curb holding their only possession—a charcoal drawing of Dred and Harriet. A woman they did not know passed them on the street, recognized the drawing, and took in the two boys. She raised them but never mentioned that she was, in fact, their aunt, Lizzie Scott. She lived until 1945, when she died of pneumonia at the age of ninety-nine. There are still Scott family descendants through Eliza and Wilson's son John.

MUSIC

Eliza's love of singing is an important part of
Freedom's Price
. In the 1840s singing was one of the few forms of free entertainment available to African Americans. It was an important part of their culture, both at church and at home. Eliza's ambition to be a songwriter would have been unusual but not impossible. “The Blue Juniata,” the song Eliza sings to Miss Sofia, was a popular song written by Marion Dix Sullivan. The song that Eliza composes throughout the story is fictional.

THE CHOLERA EPIDEMIC AND THE GREAT FIRE OF
1849

The cholera epidemic in 1849 claimed more than 4,500 lives in St. Louis. Cholera is a bacterial abdominal infection caused by contaminated food and water. There was no known cure in the mid-1800s. Today we realize that cholera can be prevented with proper sanitation, but in the 1840s little was known about the disease. Dred Scott was ahead of his time when he advised his family to wash their hands and to only drink clean water.

A print of the Great Fire at St. Louis, Thursday night, May 17, 1849

The St. Louis Great Fire of May 17, 1849, started on a paddle-wheeled steamboat, the
White Cloud
. The flames jumped to its neighbor, the
Edward Bates.
The
Edward Bates
was cut free from the dock, but the wind and current pushed it back into the levee. Within thirty minutes, a total of twenty-three steamboats had caught fire.

The fire lasted almost twelve hours, traveling slowly from the warehouse district along the levee through the downtown commercial district. Remarkably, there were only three recorded deaths, including Fire Captain Thomas Targee. To save the great St. Louis Cathedral, Captain Targee
blew up several buildings to create a firebreak. One of these buildings was Eliza's beloved music store. The firebreak was successful, but Targee died in his own explosion. Altogether 415 buildings were destroyed. The jail, the Charlesses' house, and the Baptist Church were spared. The shantytown where Celia and her mother once lived was completely destroyed.

OTHER PEOPLE IN
FREEDOM'S PRICE

Reuben Bartlett was one of the most notorious slave catchers of the time. While the
Mameluke
did travel between St. Louis and New Orleans, we don't know if Bartlett used it. Eliza's kidnapping was invented, but it was common practice for unscrupulous slave catchers to grab African Americans off the street and sell them into slavery.

Reverend John Berry Meachum started life as a slave, then purchased freedom for himself, his family, and many others with money earned from his skilled woodworking. He was educated and formally trained as a minister. Meachum started a school for African Americans in the basement of the Baptist Church. When he encountered local opposition, he moved the school to a steamboat he had built and anchored in federal waters on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. Missouri law didn't apply in the middle of the river. Both that school and the steamboat were known as the
Freedom School
.

Mrs. Charless did help the Scotts with their lawsuit. It was her brother, Taylor Blow, who helped Dr. Chaffee eventually free the family. The Scotts' owner, Mrs. Emerson,
was part of the prominent Sanford family. However, Mark Charless and his friend Frank Sanford are invented characters, as is Miss Sofia. After gold was discovered in California, it became popular for young men to seek their fortune in the gold fields. Most were not successful.

A Note about Our Sources/Further Reading
^*

THE SCOTT FAMILY

There are many books written about the
Dred Scott
case. There are fewer books about the Scotts as a family. We relied on these:

Hager, Ruth Ann (Abels).
Dred & Harriet Scott: Their Family Story.
St. Louis, MO: St. Louis County Library, 2010.

Ms. Hager is a reference specialist in St. Louis County Library's Special Collections Department, which focuses on family and local history. She is also a certified genealogist and lecturer on genealogy.

Moses, Sheila.
I, Dred Scott.
New York: Simon and Schuster's Children's Books, 2005.

A fictionalized slave narrative based on the life and legal precedent of Dred Scott. The book has a foreword by John A. Madison Jr., a great-grandson of Dred Scott.

Swain, Gwenyth.
Dred and Harriet Scott: A Family's Struggle for Freedom.
St. Paul, MN: Borealis Books, 2004.

A carefully researched family biography that begins with Dred's childhood on a Virginia plantation and continues with his later travels to Alabama, Missouri, Illinois, and the territory that would become Minnesota. The author explores the power of the Scott family ties and the severe challenges that Dred and Harriet faced as they fought for freedom for Eliza and Lizzie.

VanderVelde, Lea.
Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

An extraordinary biography about Harriet Scott, an illiterate woman who grew up in the nation's frontier. VanderVelde uses her research on the time period to piece together what Harriet's life might have been like.

Other useful resources about the Scott family include the following:

Charles River Editors.
American Legends: The Life of Dred Scott and the Dred Scott Decision
. Cambridge, MA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.

Dred Scott Heritage Foundation.
http://www.thedredscottfoundation.org/dshf/
.

Missouri State Archives. “Missouri's Dred Scott Case, 1846–1857.”
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/africanamerican/scott/scott.asp
.

LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER

The Mississippi River played a crucial role in Eliza's life as we have interpreted it. The river also played an important role in the city of St. Louis in the nineteenth century. The following three books offer a good background about life on the Mississippi River during this time period:

Buchanan, Thomas C.
Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World
. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

A well-written book that focuses on black workers, both enslaved and free, on the Mississippi during the nineteenth century.

Gillespie, Michael.
Come Hell or High Water: A Lively History of Steamboating on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

Stoddard, WI: Heritage Press, 2001.

A general history of steamboats on two major rivers. Since St. Louis was such an important location on the Mississippi, that city comes in for a fair amount of coverage in this book.

Sandlin, Lee.
Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

This book covers the entire history of the river, with a particular focus on the development of commerce on the river during the nineteenth century.

THE ST. LOUIS CHOLERA EPIDEMIC AND THE GREAT FIRE OF 1849

The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
(
www.stltoday.com
) is a local newspaper with several interesting articles about the cholera epidemic and the Great Fire of 1849. You might also check out articles in the
St. Louis Magazine
(
www.stlmag.com
) or the
Southeast Missourian
(
www.semissourian.com
). Search for “Cholera 1849” or “Great Fire 1849.”

A comprehensive survey of historical information about St. Louis, including a list of websites, can be found at the St. Louis Community Information Network (
http://stlcin.missouri.org/history/
). The website of the Missouri History Museum is also useful (
http://www.mohistory.org/
).

^*
websites active at time of publication

Photo Credits

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division:

LC-USZ62-79305:
210
; LC-USZ62-96097:
212
;

LC-USZ62-5316: front jacket (background),
215

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IDDEN
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