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Mrs. Dred Scott : a life on slavery's frontier
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. --from publisher description
Book
Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil
Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil , first published in 2006, concerns what is entailed by pledging allegiance to a constitutional text and tradition saturated with concessions to evil. The Constitution of the United States was originally understood as an effort to mediate controversies between persons who disputed fundamental values, and did not offer a vision of the good society. In order to form a 'more perfect union' with slaveholders, late-eighteenth-century citizens fashioned a constitution that plainly compelled some injustices and was silent or ambiguous on other questions of fundamental right. This constitutional relationship could survive only as long as a bisectional consensus was required to resolve all constitutional questions not settled in 1787. Dred Scott challenges persons committed to human freedom to determine whether antislavery northerners should have provided more accommodations for slavery than were constitutionally strictly necessary or risked the enormous destruction of life and property that preceded Lincoln's new birth of freedom.
eBook
Mrs. Dred Scott : a life on slavery's frontier
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.
eBook
Origins of the Dred Scott Case
The Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision denied citizenship to African Americans and enabled slavery's westward expansion. It has long stood as a grievous instance of justice perverted by sectional politics. Austin Allen finds that the outcome of Dred Scott hinged not on a single issue-slavery-but on a web of assumptions, agendas, and commitments held collectively and individually by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and his colleagues. Allen carefully tracks arguments made by Taney Court justices in more than 1,600 reported cases in the two decades prior to Dred Scott and in its immediate aftermath. By showing us the political, professional, ideological, and institutional contexts in which the Taney Court worked, Allen reveals that Dred Scott was not simply a victory for the Court's prosouthern faction. It was instead an outgrowth of Jacksonian jurisprudence, an intellectual system that charged the Court with protecting slavery, preserving both federal power and state sovereignty, promoting economic development, and securing the legal foundations of an emerging corporate order-all at the same time. Here is a wealth of new insight into the internal dynamics of the Taney Court and the origins of its most infamous decision.
eBook
The Dred Scott Case
In 1846 two slaves, Dred and Harriet Scott, filed petitions for their freedom in the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. As the first true civil rights case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court,Dred Scott v. Sandfordraised issues that have not been fully resolved despite three amendments to the Constitution and more than a century and a half of litigation.The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Lawpresents original research and the reflections of the nation's leading scholars who gathered in St. Louis to mark the 150th anniversary of what was arguably the most infamous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision, which held that African Americans \"had no rights\" under the Constitution and that Congress had no authority to alter that, galvanized Americans and thrust the issue of race and law to the center of American politics. This collection of essays revisits the history of the case and its aftermath in American life and law. In a final section, the present-day justices of the Missouri Supreme Court offer their reflections on the process of judging and provide perspective on the misdeeds of their nineteenth-century predecessors who denied the Scotts their freedom.Contributors:Austin Allen, Adam Arenson, John Baugh, Hon. Duane Benton, Christopher Alan Bracey, Alfred L. Brophy, Paul Finkelman, Louis Gerteis, Mark Graber, Daniel W. Hamilton, Cecil J. Hunt II, David Thomas Konig, Leland Ware, Hon. Michael A. Wolff
eBook
Learn about Dred Scott and the controversial court case named for him
A video for the African American History timeline: Dred Scott court decision, 1857.
Streaming Video
IS THE CONSTITUTION OF 1787 A WHITE SUPREMACIST DOCUMENT? AGAINST ESSENTIALISM IN CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION
A curious convergence is emerging in legal academia around the conclusion that the 1787 Constitution is a white supremacist document. Although most originalists would deny that contention, their methodology strongly favors, if it does not compel, an agreement with progressive, \"neo-Garrisonian\" scholars that the Constitution of 1787 is indeed a white supremacist document. Both the neo-Garrisonian and originalist elements of this implicit convergence stem from their \"essentialism\" in Constitutional interpretation: the idea that the Constitution or its terms or provisions carry auniquely and objectively correct meaning, invariant over time, and independent of our evolving normative commitments. This Article argues that essentialism is a mistaken approach to constitutional interpretation. Contrasting Chief Justice Roger Taney's lead opinion in Dred Scott, holding that Black people cannot be \"citizens\" of the United States, with Frederick Douglass's Glasgow Speech, arguing that the Constitution is not a pro-slavery document, this Article argues that these two texts embody not simply a clash of conclusions, but also a clash of approaches to understanding what the Constitution 15. Taney's opinion is archetypally originalist and essentialist; Douglass's speech, widely misunderstood as an essentialist, textualist argument, is in fact a powerful antiessentialist argument that the Constitution of 1787 was an invitation to struggle over the questions of slavery and white supremacy. The Article further disputes the widely accepted neo-Garrisonian claim that originalism and living constitutionalism both fail the Dred Scott \"test.\" While living constitutionalism, with its embrace of evolving moral values, would today reject Dred Scott, Taney's originalist opinion adheres to the tenets of the intentionalist and public meaning strands of originalism and meets present-day professional standards of originalist scholarship. Thus, while living constitutionalism can, originalism cannot disown Dred Scott.
Journal Article
Of Blackness and Indigeneity: Comments on Jodi A. Byrd's “Weather with You: Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and the Grounded Relationalities of Resistance”
This essay was adapted from a conference paper presentation given at the Critical Ethnic Studies conference in 2018. I offer a reading of Jodi Byrd's presentation that takes up her call to consider Blackness and Indigeneity in radical relationality. Byrd's insistence on spatializing simultaneous oppressions—to hold in tension the ground as Indigenous and yet also relational—is both necessary and fraught. Taking her lead to “make messy the presumed circuits of white supremacist nationalism” prevalent in iterations of settler colonialism, here I “make messy” the presumed exclusive affiliation of Blackness with enslavement and of Indigeneity with sovereignty and the dispossession of land. The entangled relationship among racism, capitalism, and colonialism also rests upon Indigenous enslavement and black dispossession and the removal of Africans from their land. As reflected in Dred Scott, under the U.S. juridical framework, Blackness marked bodies deemed outside the polity, belonging to but not a part of the nation. Subsequent changes in fundamental law relative to citizenship did not permanently resolve the issue of the relationship of the (white) nation to either Blackness or Indigeneity, but rather reflect evolving racial regimes of exclusion and forced incorporation that construct and legitimate white subjectivity. Race coerced both exclusion and assimilation, and these different racialized modes of oppression cohered and were coalesced through property.
Journal Article
Dred Scott v. Sandford
The Dred Scott v Sandford case of 1857 was brought to the Supreme Court just four years before the start of the Civil War. Dred Scott sued his master for his freedom and Judge Robert Taney ultimately ruled two things in the Dred Scott decision. First, African Americans were not citizens and had no right to sue in court. Second, Congress did not have the constitutional authority to ban slavery from the states. This case is considered one of the worst rulings in the history of the Supreme Court.
Streaming Video
Dred Scott and Gettysburg in Tullock’s constitutional mythology and Civil War memory
Between 1965 and 1988, Gordon Tullock dramatically altered his view of the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857 (Dred Scott v. Sandford. (1857). 60 U.S. 393.). In 1965, Tullock maintained the orthodox view that Dred Scott was incorrectly decided and justifiably reversed by the bloodshed of the Civil War. By the 1980s, Tullock changed his view, asserting instead that Dred Scott correctly interpreted a pro-slavery and racist Constitution. He maintained his earlier views on the emancipationist purpose of the Civil War in reversing Dred Scott. This paper explores Tullock’s evolving understanding of the Dred Scott decision, the Civil War, and the Battle of Gettysburg through the interpretive lenses of constitutional mythology and Civil War memory.
Journal Article