In April 1846, Dred Scott and his wife Harriet, enslaved by the family of an army surgeon, filed separate freedom suits in this courthouse, arguing that years spent living with their enslaver in the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory had legally freed them under Missouri's long-standing "once free, always free" doctrine. Missouri courts had ruled this way in hundreds of prior freedom suits, and a St. Louis jury initially agreed, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the decision in 1852. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in March 1857 that Black Americans could never be citizens and had no standing to sue, a decision that inflamed sectional tensions and is widely considered the worst ruling in the Court's history. A bronze statue of the Scotts was erected outside the courthouse in 2012, and the building, now part of Gateway Arch National Park, continues to interpret both this case and the more than 300 other freedom suits filed in St. Louis courts before the Civil War.