Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857 by Anne Twitty

Abstract

Reviewed by: Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857 by Anne Twitty Christopher Bonner (bio) Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857. By Anne Twitty. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii, 285. $49.99 cloth; $40.00 ebook) Dred Scott famously pursued his freedom in the courts for more than a decade, culminating in Chief Justice Roger Taney's 1857 denial that black Americans had legal rights. Before Dred Scott expands the history of that case by analyzing dozens of freedom suits filed in midwestern states in preceding decades. Anne Twitty shows that in the early republic black and white Americans had sophisticated understandings of formal law and had access to courts in which they used that knowledge. In exploring freedom suits, Twitty offers access to enslaved peoples' voices and ideas, presents a textured portrait of unfreedom, and examines the complex relations of bondage and mastery in the early United States. [End Page 250] Before Dred Scott focuses on 282 freedom suits filed in the American confluence, northern and southern states in roughly the Ohio River Valley, linked by complex histories and economies of unfreedom. Slaves and servants in the region often worked side by side, and masters regularly transported bound workers across borders. Because of that mobility and shifting state laws regulating bondage, many enslaved people found opportunities to sue for freedom. The book includes a number of case studies such as that of Judy, who was born into slavery in Virginia then sold and moved to Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, after which she pursued freedom in court. Judy filed suit in 1837, decades after she first entered free territory, and likely waited because she lived near her enslaved children and grandchildren in Missouri. Judy's story thus represents the movements and transactions through which enslaved people came to know the law and shows how they thought about the implications of legal freedom. "Slaves' extralegal ties," Twitty notes, "had profound legal consequences" (p. 91). The case studies offer complex, human portraits, often crafted from thin legal records, providing some insight into the ways enslaved people lived in bondage and imagined freedom. Twitty also examines slave owners in the region and lawyers involved in freedom suits. Those lawyers were often colonizationists, men who took on the suits to fulfill their role as officers of the court rather than to fight slavery. The discussion of slave owners shows how the law became so important to white and black people of the region. Knowing formal law enabled slave owners to secure and control the movement of human property in a way that would benefit them in a volatile economy. By the same token, enslaved people saw how central law was to their bondage and could therefore seek to use it as a path to freedom. Twitty's work complicates recent legal history scholarship that has tended to emphasize "'legalities' rather than 'law'" (p. 7). Historians have focused on the ways law functions outside of formal legal proceedings, revealing in particular how marginalized people shape legal history despite their exclusion. Twitty shows clearly that African [End Page 251] Americans both understood and had access to formal legal tools and spaces. At times, as readers are guided through tangled webs of debt, family ties, and court proceedings, the legal process can obscure the desires underlying freedom suits or the feelings of enslaved people who had their claims denied. But in a way, this emphasizes the challenges historians face as they try to understand enslaved people. Legal records can tell us a great deal about enslaved peoples' movements and labor and negotiations with their owners, but these sources emerged from structures designed to subjugate the interests and desires of black people to those of whites, and they embody some of the successes of that subjugation. Before Dred Scott thus reconstructs a legal culture from the early republic, one that involved both white and black people, free and unfree, and that was firmly rooted in understandings and uses of formal law. It will be valuable and thought-provoking reading for scholars interested in how the law worked and how black and...