But Roswell Field brought from Vermont something more than an exceptional legal equipment and the familiarity with the languages that is necessary to a mastery of the intricate old Spanish and French claims which were plastered over Missouri in those early days.  He had inherited through his mother, from her grim old Puritan ancestors, the positive opinions and unquenchable sense of duty that constitute the far-famed New England conscience.  He was born with a repugnance to slavery, whether of the will or of the body, and grew to manhood in the days when the question of the extension of negro slavery to the states and territories was the subject of fierce debate throughout the union.  He had fixed convictions on the subject when he left Newfane, and he carried them with him to the farther bank of the Mississippi.

It is to the uncompromising New England conscience of Roswell Field that his countrymen owe the institution of the proceedings that finally developed into the Dred Scott case, in which the question of the legal status of a negro was passed upon by the Supreme Court of the United States.  This is very properly regarded as the most celebrated of the many important cases adjudicated by our highest tribunal, for not only did it settle the status of Dred Scott temporarily, but the decision handed down by Chief Justice Taney is the great classic of a great bench.  It denied the legal existence of the African race as persons in American society and in constitutional law, and also denied the supremacy of Congress over the territories and the constitutionality of the “Missouri Compromise.”  Four years of civil war were necessary to overrule this sweeping opinion of Chief Justice Taney’s, which is still referred to with awe and veneration by a large minority, if not by a majority, of the legal profession.

To Roswell Field belongs the honor of instituting the original action for Dred Scott, without fee or expectation of compensation.  The details of this celebrated case, after it got into the United States courts, are a part of the history of our country.  What I am about to relate is scarcely known outside of the old Court House and Hall of Records in St. Louis.

Dred Scott was a negro slave of Dr. Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army, then stationed in Missouri.  Dr. Emerson took Scott with him when, in 1834, he moved to Illinois, a free state, and subsequently to Fort Snelling, Wis.  This territory, being north of 36 degrees and 30 minutes, was free soil under the Missouri Compromise of 1820.  At Fort Snelling, Scott married a colored woman who had also been taken as a slave from Missouri.  When Dr. Emerson returned to Missouri he brought Dred Scott, his wife, and child with him.  The case came to the attention of Roswell Field, and at once enlisted all his human sympathy and great legal ability.  His first petition to the Circuit Court for the County of St. Louis is too important and unique a human document not to be preserved in full.  It reads: