{"id":50,"date":"2016-02-28T17:24:02","date_gmt":"2016-02-28T17:24:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/?p=50"},"modified":"2016-02-29T03:29:03","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T03:29:03","slug":"dred-and-harriet-scott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/2016\/02\/28\/dred-and-harriet-scott\/","title":{"rendered":"Dred and Harriet Scott"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Original from Frank Leslie’s Magazine; Digital Copy Courtesy of House Divided Project<\/p><\/div>\n

Dred Scott might be the most famous slave in American history. \u00a0In Battle Cry of Freedom,\u00a0<\/em>James McPherson certainly spends a significant amount of time analyzing the eleven-year-long freedom suit which culminated in\u00a0Dred Scott v. Sandford<\/em> (1857)<\/a>. \u00a0Yet McPherson focuses on the legal battle at stake in the Supreme Court and pivotal role played by Chief Justice Roger Taney<\/a> (Class of 1795). \u00a0Students in History 288 should first consider what they might want to know about Dred Scott as a person. \u00a0McPherson briefly describes the origins of Scott’s case but does not provide much in the way of biographical detail, nor does he describe Scott’s family. \u00a0Yet it was probably\u00a0Harriet Robinson Scott who propelled the freedom suits forward on April 6, 1846, a fact only recently highlighted in the scholarship largely because of the work of University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde<\/a>. \u00a0VanderVelde’s fascinating biography<\/a>, Mrs. Dred Scott:\u00a0 A Life on Slavery’s Frontier <\/em>(Oxford, 2009) came out only three years ago, although an article upon which the book was based (also titled, “Mrs. Dred Scott’) did appear in the Yale Law Journal in January 1997 (now available through Lexis-Nexis<\/a>).\u00a0 There is no comparable biography of Dred Scott<\/a>, but Walter Ehrlich’s book, They Have No Rights: Dred Scott’s Struggle for Freedom <\/em>(Greenwood, 1979) is widely cited as the best study of the case’s origins in Missouri and the most detailed account of the plaintiff’s personal story (available in Dickinson Library).\u00a0 Yet the principal source on the federal case remains Don E. Fehrenbacher’s The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics <\/em>(Oxford, 1978), a landmark study which won the Pulitzer Prize, but is not currently available at the Dickinson Library (nor available in any significant way at Google Books). \u00a0For a good visual summary of the case and some helpful context on the under-appreciated role of Harriet Scott in the legal proceedings, see this online exhibit created by the Gilder Lehrman Institute with help from the House Divided Project and made available by the Google Cultural Institute.<\/p>\n