Mrs. Dred Scott

reviewed by Margaret M. Russell

Dred Scott v. Sandford (60 U.S. 393 (1857)) is widely reviled as one of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history. Etheldred "Dred" Scott and his wife had sued for their freedom in Missouri (a slave state), arguing that their prior residence in free states and territories had effected their emancipation. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's majority opinion refused to recognize Article III jurisdiction over their claim, ruling that an African American could never be a legal "citizen of a state." The Court labeled blacks as "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." (60 U.S. at 407.) Seven decades later, a future Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes, described the Dred Scott decision as a "self-inflicted wound" from which it took the Court at least a generation to recover. Generations of scholars of law, history, and political science have explored its effect on the Civil War, American constitutionalism, and the legitimacy of the Court itself.

Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier is a unique and extraordinary contribution to this literature: a historical biography of Harriet Robinson Scott, Dred Scott's longtime spouse and active co-litigant in the case, which spanned eleven years. Author Lea VanderVelde, a historian and law professor, admits the daunting challenges of her literary task: to depict accurately the story of a woman who could neither read nor write, and whose life circumstances of subordination have been "consistently erased by time and memory." VanderVelde's bold decision to move Harriet Scott from the margins to the center of the Dred Scott story required original and meticulous research into contemporaneous journals, newspapers, commercial ledgers, and court dockets.

VanderVelde succeeds brilliantly. Her methodology blends law, history, and even anthropology to compelling effect. Grounded in a lawyerly insistence on evidentiary specificity and a historian's sensitivity to social context, the book makes a careful, persuasive case for Harriet Scott's centrality both in the litigation and in protecting her family from slaveholders' predations. For example, VanderVelde uncovers extensive records of other "freedom suits" filed near St. Louis, mostly by women, at the time of the Scotts' case. Pointing out that Dred and Harriet married and started a family when he was 40 and she was 17, VanderVelde observes that Harriet and especially their young daughters stood to suffer the most as slaves of "marketable" age, vulnerable to sale. Harriet Scott, as matriarch, emerges as the driving force behind the decision to sue. Her determination emerges in marked contrast to the more reserved Dred, who after the Supreme Court's ruling described the litigation as "a heap of trouble."

Ultimately, the Scott family obtained its freedom not through the courts but through a manumission arranged by a Northern congressman to whom their ownership had been transferred. Dred Scott died less than two years later. Harriet Scott worked as a washerwoman and lived another 18 years, long enough to raise her daughters to adulthood and to become a grandmother.

VanderVelde's sharp detective work and fluid writing render Mrs. Dred Scott as readable as it is illuminating. This important work is a potent reminder that even within much-analyzed famous (and infamous) cases, fascinating human stories await excavation.

Margaret M. Russell is a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law.

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