Abolition and its Opponents: Eliza Winston Seeks Freedom

Minnesota, Slavery, and the Dred Scott Decision

Although Minnesota was a designated free state, it was still closely entwined with the system of slavery. When Fort Snelling was built in the 1820s, the U.S. Army supported slavery there by allowing its presence and by paying a supplement for officers to employ servants, including enslaved people. The supplemental pay for officers to keep servants was kept by the officers in the case of slave labor.

Dred and Harriet Scott were enslaved at the Fort and later sued for their freedom on the basis of having lived in a free state. The Supreme Court’s decision in Scott v. Sanford (1857) declared that African Americans—enslaved and free—were not citizens “within the meaning of the Constitution” who could sue for freedom, and that slave owners could take “property” anywhere. Minnesota joined other states in adopting laws to protect African Americans brought into free territory.

Eliza Winston's Case

St. Anthony Falls was also complicit in the system of slavery. Trade, Southern investments, and Southern tourism meant that white people in Minnesota also profited from wealth generated by slavery and were reluctant to resist the system. At the same time, the city of St. Anthony was also home to abolitionists and a small free Black community.

Eliza Winston was thirty years old in the summer of 1860, when she traveled from Mississippi to St. Anthony with Richard Christmas, his wife, Mary, and their young daughter. They stayed at the Winslow Hotel. While Winston was in St. Anthony, she met Emily and Ralph Grey, a free African American couple who were abolitionists. Winston shared with them that she wanted her freedom.  On August 21, Emily Grey and other abolitionists filed a legal complaint asserting that Winston was being "restrained of her liberty by her master."

Winston testified in Hennepin County Court that she wanted to be free. She wished to return to Memphis where she had once lived, and where her deceased husband, a free Black man, had purchased a home. The judge ruled in her favor. While abolitionists enthusiastically celebrated his decision, a chaotic scene erupted outside the courthouse. A crowd of white people angered by the decision and the effect it might have own their own livelihoods, gathered to protest. Winston quickly had to leave St. Anthony and Minneapolis for her safety. After being largely abandoned in the Civil War, the Winslow Hotel was razed in 1886.

On the eve of the Civil War, residents of Minneapolis grappled with questions that still resonant today: What does it mean to have a just society?

DeCarlo, Peter. Fort Snelling at Bdote: A Brief History. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2017.

Green, William D. A Peculiar Imbalance: The Rise and Fall of Racial Equality in Early Minnesota. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007.

Green, William D. "Eliza Winston and the Politics of Freedom in Minnesota, 1854–1860." Minnesota History 57, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 106–122. http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/57/v57i03p106-122.pdf

Grey, Emily O. Goodridge. "A Black Community in Memoir." Ed. Patricia C. Harpole. Minnesota History 49, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 42–53.

Lehman, Christopher P. Slavery's Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State. St Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2019.