Dred Scott was one of the most famous slaves in American history. By filing for freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court on April 6, 1846, this husband and father of two girls set in motion a chain of events that helped bring about the coming of the Civil War and the destruction of slavery.

Scott was born about 1800 in Virginia, and grew up as the property of Peter Blow. The Blow family moved westward and eventually settled in St. Louis, MO, by 1830. A few years later, U.S. Army surgeon John Emerson purchased Scott and brought him to Illinois and then the Wisconsin Territory. At Fort Snelling (in what is now Minnesota), Dred Scott married Harriet Robinson, who was owned by another white man living in the fort. Dred and Harriet Scott then raised two girls, Eliza and Lizzie.

After returning to St. Louis. John Emerson died in 1843, and his widow Irene Emerson, with the help of her brother, John Sanford, began hiring out Dred and Harriet to other slaveholders. However, because the Scotts had been held as slaves in free states and territories–not just during transit or “sojourn,” but for extended periods of time—they were eligible to sue in Missouri courts for freedom. Many historians now believe that Harriet Scott discovered this information from her pastor and was behind their freedom suits in April 1846.

The Scotts brought suit against Mrs. Emerson in 1846, which was decided against them, but in a subsequent action in 1850 the court sided with the Scotts. The Scotts had a strong legal claim, derived from the principle known as “once free, always free” and protected within the federal system by the doctrine of comity, meaning that the states had to honor each other’s laws. The startling reversal by the Missouri Supreme Court in 1852 of an earlier legal victory by the Scotts signaled a dramatic breakdown in comity and the rising threat of disunion. Both pro- and anti-slavery forces quickly realized the national implications of the state verdict and re-filed arguments in federal courts as Dred Scott v. Sandford.

The legal battle continued until March 6, 1857, when Chief Justice Roger Taney read a sweeping majority opinion from the Supreme Court that denied blacks federal citizenship rights, swept aside comity concerns, and invalidated the 1820 Missouri Compromise legislation, declaring that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. The furious backlash against the decision by Northern Republicans essentially guaranteed that the election of 1860 would be one of the most significant in American history.

Dred Scott, however, was not alive to see either that political contest or the war that subsequently ended slavery. He had died in 1858, a free man and head of a free household. Taylor Blow, the son of Dred Scott’s first owner, had made the remarkable decision in May 1857 to purchase the entire Scott family and set them free. There are still descendants of the Scotts alive today.

The reform movements that arose during the antebellum period in America focused on specific issues: temperance, abolishing imprisonment for debt, pacifism, antislavery, abolishing capital punishment, amelioration of prison conditions (with prison's purpose reconceived as rehabilitation rather than punishment), the humane treatment of animals, the humane and just treatment of Native Americans, the establishment of public institutions for the care of the destitute, orphans, blind, and mentally ill, the establishment of public schools, the abolition of tobacco use, vegetarianism, health reform, homeopathic medicine, woman's rights (including, at first, especially the establishment of a woman's right to own property apart from her husband and her right to sue for divorce), and the amelioration of labor conditions (including higher pay, the right to form unions, the right to strike, and the demand for limits on the number of work hours, and safe working conditions).

Although many people became convinced or active in one or two of these issues, the leading activists for these causes were often interchangeable, and would meet at loosely linked conventions of reformers, where they shared enthusiasms and political strategies, and jostled for leadership niches in the various reform movements. All these causes did not arise at the same time, but were added or fully articulated one by one. As each arose, many reformers—who took to calling themselves "universal reformers"—took them on and added them to their own collection of causes.

Reform activists during the early part of this period, from about 1820 to about 1840, believed that they could bring about the needed reforms essentially through convincing people, one by one, of the rightness of the cause, or by preaching at them to cause individual "conversion" to the cause. This was called "moral suasion." Unfortunately for the reformers, this did not always bring the success that they wished for—somehow people would not come around to their beliefs, or, at least, not enough of them to spontaneously change the situation that needed reforming. Many reformers, then, abandoned "moral suasion" as their leading strategy and accepted (often, at first, grudgingly) the need for "associated" effort, meaning in the beginning, efforts to organize associations to advance their causes through political action of various kinds. When even this was not found to bring about the desired reform, advocates of these causes—most particularly, of course, anti-slavery activists—began to accept the rightness of using coercive means by the state, including military and police force, to initiate and enforce the reform.

The reformers were often nourished by Anabaptist roots—especially Baptist or Quaker—or by a form of faith that was essentially a moralizing Puritanism stood on its head, which is to say, Unitarianism, whose forebears were strict Puritans, but who had concluded to reform its doctrine of "endless misery," into an optimistic one of a progressively more joyful heaven on earth. This introduced a utopian, millenialist, perfectionist strand into the reform movement, and was responsible for the innumerable small and large efforts to "come out" of the larger society and set up smaller enclaves or utopian communities, such as the well-known Brook Farm community in Massachusetts. Many of these "come outers" soon "came out," not only of religious sectarianism, but of theistic belief altogether, becoming explicit "Free Thinkers" or atheists. Unsurprisingly, the center of the reform movement was New England (especially Boston) and areas further west, like Ohio and then Michigan, where New Englanders were resettling.

Taken together, many of the reforms coalesced around the larger notion of changing society into a socialist paradise. This is not a later interpretation of what the self-declared reformers were up to, but was often expressed by the leading reformers themselves, who were individually attuned to philosophical and political trends in Europe, especially in France, Germany, and England, as they evolved after the radicalism of the French Revolution, and the resulting efforts there to abolish monarchies and long-established religious authorities. American reformers read this essentially as an effort to endow each person in an egalitarian society with a supreme autonomy over his or her own affairs. They discovered, however, a paradox at the heart of this effort—autonomous people were wayward and often needed to be coerced into egalitarian reform, which meant that a larger authority, such as the State, needed to negate individual autonomy in order to bring about an egalitarian society. Such has been the paradox at the heart of socialism ever since.

Historians have often focused on the antebellum period as the "era of reform" in America, culminating in the anti-slavery crusade of the Civil War, but it is also true that 1865 did not mark the end of the reform movement, but initiated a period that persists until today in which reformers, seemingly vindicated by the end of slavery as a result of the war, shifted their thinking so as to focus on the secular State, particularly the federal government, as the main instrument for reforming society along Progressive lines.

Both are true, though neither is the whole story.

Industrialization and the factory system that helped launch it were both part of a larger shift in the American economy from an agricultural economy to one characterized by wage labor. In 1800, for example, three quarters of the nation's workforce was "agricultural"; by 1900, the industrial and service sectors accounted for two-thirds of the workforce. As wage labor supplanted agricultural labor, growing numbers of women entered the paid workforce while unpaid housework took on new cultural and economic significance.

In a very straightforward way, the industrial revolution prompted women to enter the paid workforce. The textile industry provides a vivid illustration. The town of Lowell, MA, for example, was incorporated in 1826 and soon hosted over 30 different mills. Roughly three-quarters of their workers were women, who became nationally known as the "Lowell Mill Girls." In this the textile industry led a broader trend. Between 1850 and 1900, the percentage of all women aged 16 years or older employed in manufacturing industries—most of whom could be categorized as "working class"—ranged between 16 and 23 percent.

In addition to prompting many women to take paid work outside the home, the industrial revolution changed the cultural and economic value of unpaid "housework." Although much of the actual work that women performed in the "domestic sphere" remained the same across the 19th century—cooking, cleaning, caring for children, maintaining family social relationships, and otherwise managing the household economy—culturally it lost much of its former value. As one historian has put it, the "gender division of labor" that once existed slowly became "a gendered definition of labor": men earned wages outside the home ("labor"), and women did unpaid work ("not labor") within it.

Yet this cultural devaluation of women's household work masked its continuing, deep-seated economic importance. Few working-class male wage-earners, for example, earned enough cash to meet all household economic needs, and relied on women's unpaid labor to make up the difference. In other words, working-class women's unpaid work was integral to the basic process of industrialization, providing a hidden "subsidy" to manufacturers that allowed them to pay less-than-subsistence wages to their employees. In this sense, both of the major types of work that women performed—paid and unpaid—were economically significant components of the industrial revolution in the United States.