Reckoning with Slavery's Legacy in St. Louis

The Old Courthouse in St. Louis, where a statue of Dred and Harriet Scott was placed in 2012. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.

A gateway to the east

St. Louis is called "the Gateway to the West" for the settlers who passed through by steamboat, railroad and wagon trail. Many enslaved St. Louisans looked east instead: the Mississippi River was the boundary between slavery and freedom.

• Dreams broken: freedom seekers helped by Mary Meachum in 1855 were caught near the river and re-enslaved; pro-slavery residents of Illinois often helped capture freedom seekers; and Francis McIntosh, a free steamboat cook, was killed by a mob after stepping off the river.
• Dreams realized: Hiram Reed, a steamboat worker whose enslaver joined the Confederacy, was declared free by Union General John C. Frémont as a punishment to the enslaver — news the New York Times reported — and went on to fight for others' freedom in the Union army.

There was no easy road to freedom, and freedom seekers went in every direction, but the nearest free soil lay just across the river. The abolitionist William Wells Brown wrote: "The thought of death was nothing frightful to me, with that of being caught, and again carried back into slavery. Nothing but the prospect of enjoying liberty could have induced me to undergo such trials."

The silence of slavery in the city's landscape

• Honoring enslavers: streets and towns bear the names of enslavers — William Clark, Peter Lindell, Thomas Skinker, William Dorsett, James Jennings, James H. Lucas, Anne Lucas Hunt. Two communities and O'Fallon Park are named for John O'Fallon, an enslaver and one of the city's richest men.
• Little to mark the enslaved: physical reminders of slavery have been torn down for the pain they carry, and few historical markers tell enslaved people's stories.
• The Confederate monument: in 1914 the Daughters of the Confederacy paid for a monument in Forest Park to White Confederate soldiers, claiming they "battled to preserve the independence of the states" without saying why eleven Southern states left the Union. After protests — including 2015 demonstrations — the city arranged its removal in 2017.
• New memorials: in 2012 the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation and the National Park Service funded Harry Weber's statue of Dred and Harriet Scott at the Old Courthouse, facing east toward the river. Ten years later, Preston Jackson's memorial to the nearly 300 enslaved people who filed freedom suits was dedicated at the St. Louis Civil Courts building.

Dred Scott, Harriet Scott, and their daughters Eliza and Lizzie in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1857. Library of Congress.

School and church

Peter Hawkins, about 1905: the first child born to an enslaved couple at St. Stanislaus Seminary, he was enslaved by the Jesuits until the end of the Civil War and afterward worked for them for wages for the rest of his life. Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project.

• The Catholic Church enslaved hundreds of Black St. Louisans. People enslaved by the Jesuits worked at St. Stanislaus Seminary and farm in Florissant and at Saint Louis University (SLU), where they cooked, cleaned, built and farmed. Eleven SLU presidents bought, sold and rented enslaved people from 1818 to 1865.
• Washington University (WashU): when it was founded in 1853, seven of its founding members were enslavers. John O'Fallon funded its O'Fallon Polytechnic Institute, and research finds that founder William Greenleaf Eliot did little to challenge slavery and even argued for colonizing Black Americans in Africa.
• Faith and slavery: not all Christians supported slavery, but many White Protestants and Catholics in St. Louis defended it as biblical and profited from it.

Reckoning today

• SLU: in 2016, SLU and the Jesuits U.S. Central and Southern Province formed the Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project, which works with the Descendants of the Saint Louis University Enslaved, who seek to honor their ancestors and pursue reparative justice.
• WashU: the WashU & Slavery Project is researching the university's ties to slavery.

Part of the NPS series The History of Slavery in St. Louis. Previous: Black Life in St. Louis During Reconstruction. Next: Transcription of "The Code Noir".

Sources

Based on "Reckoning with Slavery's Legacy in St. Louis," Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Pictures: the Historic American Buildings Survey and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (Library of Congress), no known restrictions; they replace photographs credited to an individual, St. Louis Public Radio and Washington University. The source calls the Jesuit body a "Conference"; it is the Jesuits' U.S. Central and Southern Province.