Henry Taylor Blow (July 15, 1817 – September 11, 1875) was a two-term U.S. Representative from Missouri and an ambassador to both Venezuela and Brazil.

Henry was born in Southampton County, Virginia, to Captain Peter and Elizabeth (Taylor) Blow, owners of the famous enslaved man Dred Scott.

[2] In 1830 the family moved again to St. Louis, Missouri, where Peter Blow opened a boarding house, and hired out his slaves, including Dred Scott, who worked as a roustabout.

[2] Henry Blow graduated from Saint Louis University[4] and started apprenticing in a law office, but was forced by the deaths of his parents to become a clerk in his brother-in-law Charless' business, selling paint and oil.

[5] Peter Blow had left his estate to his two unmarried daughters and Henry's younger brothers, Taylor and William.

Charless retained ownership of the drugstore and Blow kept the manufacturing firm, which was later known as Collier White Lead and Oil Company.

Both men contributed money to finance the case, which made its way through the legal system, all the way to the Supreme Court.

[3] Blow served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

[3] One of them, Susan Elizabeth Blow, became a noted nineteenth-century educator[8] who started the nation's first all-district kindergarten.

Blow built a Victorian mansion on the land that held a library with elaborate paneling and stained glass windows that were later installed at the Missouri History Museum.

[3] Blow was a convert to Catholicism, and was responsible for Dred Scott being buried at Calvary Cemetery in St.

[3] Blow's funeral service lasted two hours and a special train was commissioned to take mourners from St. Louis to his home in Carondelet.