Craig,
I believe you are right about Scott's case as a test case that they expected to lose.  Radical abolitionists held that repentance for the sin of slavery was the necessary key to the ending of the institution and that human efforts -- legislatures, petitions, voting, etc. were all flawed, indeed futile, instruments in comparison.   This was part of their essential anarchism.   But they could point to the real failures of legislative compromise (Missouri Compromise scuttled), and popular voting (Kansas), and the expectation among them was that the Dred Scott decision would demonstrate that courts -- even the Supreme Court -- were no more able to resolve the issue than those.  Knowing the make-up of that court made it all but a safe bet.

David Kiracofe
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From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Kilby [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2012 6:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dred Scott decision--Scott was freed

Perhaps this is a mere footnote, but In the aftermath of the Dred Scott decision, Scott (and presumably his wife Harriet) was freed by a new owner after the Supreme Court decision.  He died in St. Louis in 1858. The St. Louis Visitors and Convention Commission has an interesting sub-link called "Multi-Cultural St. Louis" which covers this, and Elijah Lovejoy. Not detailed, of course, but a fair summary of what happened.

http://explorestlouis.com/media-page/news-releases-newsroom/releases/multicultural-st-louis/

Craig Kilby

P.S. Now WHY do I remember once reading that Scott's owners were not really interested in winning this case, and in fact they had bascially granted Scott his de facto freedom. The intent of this suit, from the foggy bottoms of my memory, was as a test case. I'm wondering if the "new owner" mentioned in the website above was not actually Sanford himself.

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