Mrs. Dred Scott

Among the most infamous U.S. Supreme Court decisions is Dred Scott v. Sandford . Despite the case''s signal importance as a turning point in America''s history the lives of the slave litigants have receded to the margins of the record as conventional accounts have focused on the case''s judges and lawyers. In telling the life of Harriet Dred''s wife and co-litigant in the case this book provides a compensatory history to the generations of work that missed key sources only recently brought to light. Moreover it gives insight into the reasons and ways that slaves used the courts to establish their freedom. A remarkable piece of historical detective work Mrs. Dred Scott chronicles Harriet''s life from her adolescence on the 1830s Minnesota-Wisconsin frontier to slavery-era St. Louis through the eleven years of legal wrangling that ended with the high court''s notorious decision. The book not only recovers her story but also reveals that Harriet may well have been the lynchpin in this pivotal episode in American legal history. Reconstructing Harriet Scott''s life through innovative readings of journals military records court dockets and even frontier store ledgers VanderVelde offers a stunningly detailed account that is at once a rich portrait of slave life an engrossing legal drama and a provocative reassessment of a central event in U.S. constitutional history. More than a biography the book is a deep social history that freshly illuminates some of the major issues confronting antebellum America including the status of women slaves Free Blacks and Native Americans.