Picture the cruel machinery of American slavery once playing out here in full public view. Before the courthouse steps served as a venue for freedom suits, this area of downtown St. Louis was home to one of the busiest slave markets west of the Mississippi River. St. Louis occupied a peculiar position: a slave state city on the border of free territory, a commercial hub whose prosperity was built on both free labor and enslaved labor simultaneously.
Slave auctions were conducted in the open, in the shadow of civic buildings. Families were separated here. People were sold here as casually as livestock.
After the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision, the nation was shaken to its core. Dred and Harriet Scott were finally manumitted — freed — by their then-owner just months after the ruling, but Dred died of tuberculosis the following year, never having seen the larger freedom his case helped bring about. The Civil War came four years later.
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. Harriet lived to see it. Harriet lived to see slavery abolished; Dred, dead of tuberculosis, did not.