First, I
want to thank Karen, Dan, and Mitra for inviting me to guest blog this month. I
have been an avid reader of LHB for years, but this month will be my first
foray into blogging. I’m looking forward
to the conversations it will (hopefully) generate!
My plan is
to write a series of posts about the (long) process of writing my first book, In
the Shadow of Dred
Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the
Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America
(UGA Press,
2017). I have chosen to loosely organize
these posts around the theme of “balance” while including a mix of discussions
of my personal experience (and hopefully a few lessons learned) and some of the
content of my work. With a new year upon
us, I am constantly reminded of how often I struggle with achieving any sort of
balance in my work or my personal life. I
write these posts about balance, not because I am any sort of expert on getting
things right; in fact, I’d say the opposite is usually true. But I often think about, read about, and
fumble along to achieve a rough kind of balance in the various areas of life
(historian, teacher, mom of two). It is
my hope that these posts will provide fodder for conversation about other
strategies, advice, or challenges LHB readers have faced along the way to publication,
full-time teaching, and tenure and promotion.
Today,
though, I will simply introduce my book.
It looks at the legal battles between enslaved people and their
enslavers, using these court cases as a jumping off point for discussing local legal
culture in the antebellum era. The
structure follows the basic stages of a suit for freedom, beginning with the
statutes that allowed for this type of legal case, and concluding with a
chapter on the broader political context of freedom suits, most notably the
role of Dred Scott in regional and
national politics in the decade prior to the American Civil War.
The book
has much to say to historians who are not specialists in legal history. In it, I explain how these suits actually
worked and how various actors interacted with the law. But it is my hope that the book will also
speak to legal scholars by investigating some of the nitty-gritty issues
confronted by antebellum litigants. It
features discussions of the attorneys and judges involved in freedom suits, the
arguments used for suing (and defending suits) for freedom, as well as the
legal consciousness of the enslaved plaintiffs who brought almost 300 freedom
suits in the St. Louis Circuit Court from 1814-1860.
I conclude
that enslaved persons in this urban environment had multiple avenues for
learning about law and connecting with the arguments and the legal actors
necessary to win freedom in court. But
bringing suit was not without its risks; many of the plaintiffs faced the grim
reality of physical punishment, sale away from the court’s jurisdiction, or
countless other horrors as a result of their legal action.
The book
includes some comparative context about freedom suits in other states,
too. Although some of the discussions of
comparative case law ended up on the cutting room floor, I read nearly 1,000
state supreme court opinions to provide context for the St. Louis story. One area where I do include broader data is
in the appendix, which has a series of charts that indicate the arguments
presented and rates of success for the St. Louis cases.
In my next
post, I will explain more about how I came to this topic by balancing a number of interests of mine
and incorporating the wise counsel of legal historians and archivists.
