But since i'm here I thought I’d clear a few things up. Mostly, that my life wasn’t the grand, sombre march of martyrdom they make it out to be. It was, for the most part, a long, frustrating, and occasionally farcical inconvenience with racism and whips.
I was born into this whole being a slave business. No one asked my opinion on the matter, which I thought was rather poor form from the outset. My first 'owner,' the Peter Blow family, were, by all accounts, decent enough chaps. For people who thought they owned me, of course.
Then came Dr. John Emerson. A blighter in the army. He was my assigned ‘manager,’ if you will. And he was promoted. A lot. This is where the whole kerfuffle kicked off. He dragged me from the slave-holding state of Missouri to Illinois. Now, Illinois, as I’m sure you know, had rather progressive views on the whole ‘people owning people’ front. Namely, they were against it. I thought, Splendid! Fresh start!
But no. Dr. Emerson simply ignored the local laws. Then he hauled me up to the Wisconsin Territory, where the same rules applied. Legally, I should have been free. Instead, I was just a very confused and very illegal slave in a free territory. It was all a bit of a muddle.
After a decade of this continental goose-chase, Dr. Emerson popped his clogs, and his widow inherited me. And here, I had a thought. A rather bold one, I’ll admit. I thought, You know what, I’ve had quite enough of this. I’d served my time. I’d lived in free states. It felt like I’d served my sentence. So, I did what any reasonable person would do. I offered to buy my freedom. A perfectly reasonable transaction, no?
She refused.
So, I did what any slightly-less-reasonable, now-rather-annoyed person would do. I sued her but i wasn’t what you’d call a legal eagle. My grand contribution to my case was mostly just standing there, looking a bit miffed, while my lawyers did the heavy lifting.
The case bounced around the courts for years. It was the ultimate bureaucratic nightmare and then, the big one. The Supreme Court. The head honchos. The final boss level. I imagined them as wise, thoughtful chaps who’d see the glaringly obvious injustice of it all. Silly me. Chief Justice Roger Taney, a man whose face looks permanently sour as if he’d just discovered his tea was cold, wrote the majority opinion.
He declared that no person of African ancestry, whether slave or free, could be a citizen of the United States. And if you’re not a citizen, you can’t sue in federal court. Case dismissed. My entire case, my entire life, was wiped away with a single, condescending sentence. The whole thing, he declared, was an issue for the states to decide, which was a bit like telling the chickens to have a quiet word with the fox.
The verdict, as you might imagine, caused a bit of a stir. It did not, it’s fair to say, calm things down. In fact, it rather poured petrol on the fire. And here I am, a footnote in my own disaster. The man who lost the most consequential court case in American history. I wasn’t trying to start a civil war, you know. I was just trying to stop being someone else’s property.
So what happened in the end? After all that, after nine judges in Washington told me I was so much chattel, the original Blow family, the very people who owned me as a boy, they bought me and my wife. And then they set us free. So, after a decade of legal battling, it all came down to a spot of old-fashioned charity. You couldn't write it. It's all a bit of a shambles, really.
As for my death? I’m afraid it was terribly pedestrian. Tuberculosis. Not a dramatic last stand. Just a slow, fading cough, and then, pop. It turns out that the only way for a black man to fully escape the American legal system in the 1850s was, well, to die. A bit drastic, but effective.
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