Dred Scott did not live to see Abraham Lincoln take the oath of office in March 1861. Following the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling, Scott was returned to Irene Emerson, who had married abolitionist Calvin Chaffee. Unwilling to be the owner of the most well-known slave in America, Chaffee quickly returned Dred Scott and his family to his original owners, the Blow family. The Blows then freed the Scotts. For the next year and a half, before dying of tuberculosis, Dred Scott lived as a free man. Although Harriet and their daughters lived to see slavery abolished, in the spring of 1861 they could not imagine how that goal would be reached.

In 1860 John C. Frémont believed the nation was headed to war; and he was willing, once again, to serve a country he had helped expand. His work as a surveyor and soldier opened new territories to white settlement, and the gold rush then ensured California’s admission to the Union. Yet what Frémont and other advocates of manifest destiny saw as U.S. victories had decimated many Indian nations as well as the property rights and livelihoods of many Mexicans. Despite the efforts of the Comanche and other tribes to fend off white encroachment, the U.S. government and white settlers claimed more and more territory. It was these western territories, moreover, that heightened conflicts over slavery and led the nation to the situation it faced in spring 1861.

While some Confederate planters imagined expanding the nation—and slavery—into Cuba, Nicaragua, and other southern regions, Northerners fought any such schemes. Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act and appalled by Bleeding Kansas, militant activists applauded John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. Just as important, more moderate Northerners increasingly opposed slavery and voted for Lincoln in the fall of 1860. By the time Abraham Lincoln took office in March 1861, however, seven southern states had seceded, and the ever-widening political chasm brought the nation face-to-face with civil war.