Sadly much of this Wikipedia entry is wrong -- why are we not surprised? This is the danger of using a source that has no scholarly oversight.
Dr. Emerson's widow did marry Chaffee (got that right) and moved to Mass. At that point she gave or sold the Scotts to Sanford. That was about 1850. Sanford defended Scott v. Emerson in the Missouri S.C. even though Emerson no longer owned the Scotts. By the time the case reached national significance Mrs. Chaffee had not owned the Scotts for years and so her new husband could not possibly have intervened. Nor could his wife (Irene) have given the Scotts back to the Blow family.
The Blow family had moved to Mo. sometime between 1829 and 1830 (thus the "by this time" is nonsense) and had been living there ever since. Scott was sold to Emerson in 1832 when his owner, Peter Blow, died. Peter Blow's sons continued to live in St. Louis and helped the Scotts sue for freedom starting in 1846. Wikipedia got that right.
After the case Sanford sold Scott to the Blow brothers and Scott was freed.
I hope this helps.
By the way, all of this detail illustrates why it was emphatically not a "test case" but merely a case to win freedom based on free state (Illinois) and free territory (Wisconsin, now Minn.) residence.
----
Paul Finkelman
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, NY 12208
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________________________________
From: Craig Kilby <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 1:31 PM
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Dred Scott decision--Scott was freed
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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