Tobias Barrington Wolff at The Big Picture:

During the extended assault on the Minneapolis-St. Paul area by ICE and Border Patrol in early 2026, the Whipple Federal Building abruptly went from a largely unknown federal facility to a place of infamy. Located in a small unorganized territory in Hennepin County called Fort Snelling on the outskirts of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, Whipple is where most of the people ICE has subjected to abusive detention during its assault on Minnesota have been taken and held, often with little regard for their citizenship or immigration status. Myriad reports from Whipple tell of substandard detention conditions, denial of access to medical care and violations of the civil and human rights of detainees. For many, Whipple has just been a way station on a trafficking route that will bring them to the Dilley incarceration facility in South Texas where conditions are even worse. Liam Conejo Ramos, the little boy in the blue bunny hat whom federal immigration agents used as bait to seize his father, was trafficked through Whipple on his way to Dilley. When about a hundred members of the clergy were arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport for engaging in peaceful protest of ICE abuses, they chose their location in part because of its proximity to Whipple and the trafficking run through that facility. This is not the first time the land around the Whipple Building has been a site of trafficking, violations of human rights, and assaults on the concept of citizenship. Almost two hundred years ago, two Black Americans were illegally trafficked to a U.S. military post located on that same stretch of the Mississippi Riverfront. The garrison was called Fort Snelling, now referred to as Historic Fort Snelling, and it gave that territory in Hennepin County the name it still bears. This aerial view shows both properties today: the Whipple Federal Building on the left side of the frame and Historic Fort Snelling on the right: The Black married couple who were trafficked and abused on this land, nearly two centuries before the arrival of ICE, launched a fight for their freedom that changed the United States forever. Their names were Dred and Harriet Scott.

The Missouri Compromise, Fort Snelling, and the Trafficking of Black Americans

The original Fort Snelling was built by the U.S. Army between 1819 and 1825. Located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers on land long occupied by the Dakota peoples, the garrison was encompassed within what the U.S. then called the Wisconsin Territory. Federal law had prohibited the practice of enslavement in that territory from the early days of the Republic and that prohibition continued under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, one of the most consequential in the series of obscene bargains Congress struck over the atrocity of slavery. The 1820 law admitted Missouri to the Union as an enslaver state, admitted Maine as a free state, and banned the practice of enslavement in U.S. territory above the 36°30’ latitude outside Missouri itself. The Wisconsin Territory included what are now the States of Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota along with parts of the Dakotas. Following the 1820 compromise, enacted shortly after construction of Fort Snelling began, federal law dictated that the military base must be free from enslavement.

[...]

That language creating a caveat for criminal punishment still exists in the Thirteenth Amendment, sad to say, and the provision for the return of “fugitives” reflects a conflict between enslaver states and free states that was written into the original Constitution. But an even more common slavery practice contaminated Fort Snelling from the beginning: the trafficking of Black Americans to free territory on what the enslavers claimed was a transient basis. When enslavers traveled around the United States they sometimes forced people held in bondage to accompany them as personal servants. When a free state was the travel destination an enslaver would often traffic the individual there nonetheless, introducing slavery on a transient basis into the free jurisdiction. These were not short sojourns. “Transient” often meant a period of years, as was true for both Dred and Harriett Scott.

This aggressive trafficking practice gave rise to one of the major interstate legal disputes of the enslavement period: whether a trafficked individual who was able to secure legal assistance could sue to be declared free after being brought into a free jurisdiction by an enslaver. (I have written about that issue in some depth here.) A noted 1772 ruling of the English Court of King’s Bench, Somerset v. Stewart, had established the principle that the legal status of enslavement cannot be enforced in a free jurisdiction, meaning a person can sue for freedom when trafficked into a free state. By the 1830s courts in Massachusetts, Ohio and even the enslaver state of Louisiana had held the same, though the issue remained highly contested.

[...]

The Dred Scott Case

Dred and Harriett Scott argued that the decision of their enslavers to traffic them to the free jurisdictions of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory entitled them to be declared free, both under the law of Missouri where they were still being held in bondage when they brought their lawsuits and by operation of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. They litigated their claims for almost fifteen years and ultimately ended in defeat, first before the Missouri Supreme Court and then in the Supreme Court of the United States. The 1857 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court is infamous for its attempt to write a permanent status of dehumanization and disqualification from citizenship for Black Americans into the Constitution. Dred Scott v. Sandford invented a constitutional right for enslavers to traffic people for labor and sexual exploitation anywhere in the United States, overriding prohibitions against enslavement by free States and declaring the Missouri Compromise of 1820 invalid. In the process, it declared that our Constitution was founded on a principle of White Supremacy that held Black Americans “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Black people could never be made citizens of the United States or any State under the Constitution that Chief Justice Roger Taney narrated.

Dred Scott left no path forward for Black Americans to secure basic human rights or legal protection, no possibility of a political resolution between enslaver States and free States attempting to contain the practice of slavery, and no alternative to White Supremacy as the defining principle of our Constitution. The decision contributed significantly to the descent into open hostilities and war that soon followed. When the Civil War ended and Congress and the States crafted the constitutional amendments that would fundamentally change the formal parameters of our system of government, the enormities of Dred Scott hovered over all those reconstruction deliberations, as historian Eric Foner has put it.

The trafficking and abuse of Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott at Fort Snelling was the human origin of that judicial betrayal. The Scott family stood for the millions of Black Americans seeking to liberate themselves from enslavers. Today the Visitor’s Center at Fort Snelling makes their story and the morally diseased strain of U.S. history in which it unfolded a central part of the account of that land and the continuing importance of the site. The same land along the banks of the Mississippi River where the Whipple Building operates today.

This is a gift🎁link so anyone can read the entire NY Times article, even if they don' subscribe to the Times.

Jamelle Bouie does another excellent job of looking at current events through the perspective of American history. In this column, he compares the current Roberts Court with the infamous late 1850s/ early 1860s Taney Court--the Court that lost all credibility with its Dred Scott decision. Below are a few excerpts.

If the chief currency of the Supreme Court is its legitimacy as an institution, then you can say with confidence that its account is as close to empty as it has been for a very long time. Since the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization nearly two years ago, its general approval with the public has taken a plunge. [...] In the latest 538 average, just over 52 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court, and around 40 percent approved. [...] At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, you can draw a useful comparison between the Supreme Court’s current political position and the one it held on the eve of the 1860 presidential election. [color emphasis added]

[See more below the cut.]

Today In History

Dred Scott was born into slavery in Southampton, Virginia, around 1795, the property of the Peter Blow family. He was given the name “Sam” but took the name of his older brother, Dred, when the latter died.

In 1836, Scott who was approximately 41, married a teenaged slave, Harriett Robinson, at Fort Snelling who was owned by another U.S. Army officer, Major Lawrence Taliaferro of Virginia. Scott and Robinson gave birth to their first child, Eliza, in 1838 and a second daughter, Lizzie, in 1840, and their two children were born free.

In 1843, Emerson died and left his estate to his widow, Irene Sanford Emerson. When Scott offered to purchase his freedom for $300 in 1846, Emerson refused his offer. He then obtained the assistance of two St. Louis attorneys who helped him to sue for his freedom. His 1846 lawsuit was filed in the St. Louis Circuit Court and went to trial in 1847.

Scott lost this case, but later that year he won a second trail. By this point Scott received financial support and legal representation from the sons of Peter Blow, his former owner, who had become anti-slavery advocates, Irene Sanford Emerson’s brother, John Sanford, and her second husband, Dr. C.C. Chaffee, a Massachusetts abolitionist. To all of them the Scott case as an important challenge to slavery.

On March 6, 1857, the United States Supreme Court finally ruled in Dred Scott v Sandford [Sanford was misspelled by a court clerk]. In a 7-2 decision written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the majority of justices said that Scott and all slaves and free blacks were not citizens of the United States and therefore had no standing in the courts. The backlash to this decision strengthened the abolitionist movement and further divided the North and South, leading four years later to the U.S. Civil War.

After he was freed, Dred Scott went to work as a porter in the St. Louis area. He died from tuberculosis in September 1858. Harriett Scott died eighteen years later on June 17, 1876.