By Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence
The American attorney and newspaper publisher Francis Butter Murdoch (1808–1882), who helped organize the first Swedenborgian congregation in St. Louis, also saved Harriet and Dred Scott’s slavery freedom case from never happening. Due to their lack of funds, the Scotts had several attorneys drop their case, reports Lea VanderVelde, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, in Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (Oxford University Press, 2009). Murdoch, at the same time he was organizing the first Swedenborgian church in that city, was the most active attorney filing freedom cases for African Americans, and he took the Scotts’ case essentially pro bono. Here’s what we know.
Religion Played a Part
It appears Christian faith did play a role in the Scotts connecting with Murdoch. Of the two Scotts, Harriet became much more active in a Black Baptist church in St. Louis and had many more social connections beyond that through her work as a laundress. The spiritual leader of her church was Rev. John Meachum, who worked together with his sons in a profitable barrel-making business through whose profits they would buy slaves so they could work off the debt into freedom. Meachum believed buying freedom was a better route to liberty than suing or escaping, but nevertheless, his church was a hotbed of lawsuit activities, and Harriet was one of several church members who sought their freedom through the work of St. Louis lawyer Francis B. Murdoch. He had already successfully represented at least sixteen other plaintiffs in freedom suits. The Scotts, however, had tried several other attorneys who all quit on them because they could pay little to no money.
At this time, Murdoch was also busy organizing a new religious group in the region—the Swedenborgians—and hosting outreach discussion meetings in his home. That fledgling group would go on to become the First Society of The New Jerusalem in that city. In J. Thomas Scharf’s 1883 book, History of Saint Louis City and County, from the Earliest Periods to the Present Day including Biographical Sketches of Representative Men (v. 2, p. 1,741), Francis B. Murdoch is listed as a member of the First New Jerusalem Society of St. Louis, the same church that still exists today as Church of the Open Word in the suburb of Creve Coeur under the leadership of Pastor Paul Deming.
Murdoch was known to work without much or any pay because, both as an attorney and as a writer, he worked fervently for civil rights and dismantling the detestable institution of slavery. It was his special cause, and he is now known by legal historians precisely for his inordinately large number of freedom lawsuit filings—a business approach that ultimately left him destitute enough that he needed to foreclose on all his local interests and leave the area and move to Berrien Springs, Michigan to start over. However, he is the one who saved the case, pushing through all the proper legal groundwork for the filing and maintaining its standing. He filed one-third of all freedom lawsuits in the federal court of St. Louis up until his financial failure in the summer of 1846. In the historical archives of Berrien Springs, a lot assigned to Francis Butter Murdoch was designated for a New Jerusalem church.
After a few years in Berrien Springs, he moved to San Jose, California, where he would live for the last thirty-six years of his life—notably, editing and publishing the San Jose Telegraph, which is today The San Jose Mercury News, San Jose’s major daily. He also founded the San Jose Patriot, his own daily that ran from 1867 to 1876. While we don’t know his religious thoughts after leaving Missouri, we do know he was avid enough about the Swedenborgian movement at the time of taking on Harriet and Dred Scott’s case that he was on the ground floor of organizing what is today our church ministry in that city.
Murdoch’s Scathing Critique of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott Decision
The Dred and Harriet Scott case in St. Louis that Murdoch saved and launched ultimately went to the Supreme Court with another attorney and resulted in the infamous Dred Scott decision issued on March 6, 1857, and penned by the Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in a 7–2 decision (Justices McLean and Curtis delivered dissenting opinions). Citing several Constitutional and statutory case laws, the highest court declared African descent people whether free or slave, are not and cannot be citizens of the United States within the meaning of the Constitution, and that holding citizenship in a free state does not automatically render a person a citizen of the United States.
The next month in the San Jose Telegraph in its April 28, 1857, issue, Murdoch decimated the majority opinion point-by-point in a fashion now widely seen as correct. After listing the primary legal arguments made by Taney, Murdoch concludes,
This decision is adverse to and reverses a whole host of legal decisions not only in the Supreme Court of the United States, but also innumerable decisions made by Courts in the Slave States. It is adverse to the opinions of the great array of great and good men who have controlled this Government in political operation from its foundation to the present time. It, in fact, inaugurates a Revolution, which will be more potent in its consequences than that which ever arms have affected. Henceforth, Republicans, be a Minute Man. The battle has but begun. Your leaders in the great States are in council. The banner of Freedom is yet borne aloft in the Republican ranks, and accursed be the traitor who ever trails it before the Juggernaut of Slavery.
This case became the most important legal battle leading up to the Civil War. While the South gloated that its position had become the law of the land, the Dred Scott decision fueled fury among freedom forces and dramatically pushed the country closer toward the outbreak of the American Civil War. The case demolished the delicate agreement between slave and free states and produced a national rage. Another Midwest attorney, Abraham Lincoln, vehemently protested the Dred Scott ruling and would be running for president. He believed the Dred Scott ruling immorally stripped enslaved people of their humanity and validated evil. Today the Dred Scott case is taught as the legal line in the sand marking a point of no return from what became a Civil War.
Murdoch Has Never Appeared in Our Archives… Until Now
This Swedenborgian lawyer, Francis Butter Murdoch, could not be found in our archives either in Berkeley or Urbana. The reason seems clear: Murdoch’s activity organizing the first Swedenborgian ministry in St. Louis occurred before records or histories were being attempted in that city. Murdoch grew up in Bedford, Pennsylvania, where a New Church Society sprouted during Murdoch’s youth, but other than mentions in early documents, no actual records survive from that community. Murdoch’s final thirty-six years in San Jose put him a day’s trip by stagecoach to two Swedenborgian churches, and it will be worth taking a little time to explore the archives there for any mention or connection.
Dewey Murdick, a local historian in Berrien Springs, Michigan, first unearthed this story by researching the earliest plat owners of the fledgling town of Berrien Springs and finding one plat originally owned by Francis Butter Murdoch that was specifically dedicated “for a Christian church of the New Jerusalem denomination.” Intrigued, Mr. Murdick began communicating with historians in our church that, in addition to me, include Sue Ditmire and Pastor Robbin Ferriman, who are both currently involved in administrating our denominational archives that last year were moved from Boston, Massachusetts, to Urbana, Ohio. Their further research uncovered Francis’s close connection to the Murdoch clan that was active in the Urbana area and at the Fryeburg New Church Assembly. Francis Murdoch’s niece, Florence Murdoch, was a longtime participant at the Fryeburg summer camp and funded the Murdoch Cabin still in loving use there.
Read the full issue of the September/October 2024 Messenger
Meet Jim Lawrence
Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence is the president of the Swedenborgian Church of North America. He was the dean of the Center for Swedenborgian Studies for 21 years prior to being elected President in 2022.
