All,

I was wondering about who freed Scott after the SCOTUS decision, and in general "then what happened?" the story was a lot more interesting than I had expected:

From the wikipedia biography of Dred Scott, title simply, "Dred Scott" at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott

we read this account:

"Following the ruling, Scott and his family were returned to Emerson's widow. In the meantime, her brother John Sanford had been committed to an insane asylum. In 1850, Irene Sanford Emerson had remarried. Her new husband, Calvin C. Chaffee, was an abolitionist, who shortly after was elected to the US Congress. Chaffee was apparently unaware that his wife owned the most prominent slave in the United States until one month before the Supreme Court decision. By then it was too late for him to intervene, and Chaffee was harshly criticized for having been married to a slaveholder. He was able to convince his wife Irene to return Scott to his original owners, the Blow family. By this time, the Blow family had relocated to Missouri and become opponents of slavery, granting the Scotts emancipation by Henry Taylor Blow on May 26, 1857, less than three months after the Supreme Court ruling.Scott went to work as a porter in St. Louis for nearly 17 months before he died from tuberculosis in September 1858. Scott was survived by his wife and his two daughters."

Also stated in another wiki article is that it was the sons of Peter Blow, Scotts' original owner, who paid for Scott's legal expenses.

Craig Kilby

P.S. It seem somewhat implausible that Calvin Chaffee was clueless as to the whole affair going on with his wife's slave until one month before the Supreme Court ruling in 1858.
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