Before Dred Scott
Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857

An analysis of slave and slaveholder understanding and manipulation of formal legal systems in the region known as the American Confluence during the antebellum era.

Anne Twitty (Author)

9781107530898, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 March 2018

299 pages, 2 b/w illus. 1 map 2 tables
23 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.46 kg

'Drawing on 282 freedom suits, Twitty seeks to depict how law operated as a contested reality amid the indeterminacy that defined both race and race-based status. Following the maturing historiography moving beyond the black-letter law of statutes and codes, Twitty probes what she describes as a legal culture constructed by everyday interactions. In short, she reaches to law as a lived reality rather than as an inscribed text … enlightening …' Thomas J. Davis, The Journal of American History

Before Dred Scott draws on the freedom suits filed in the St Louis Circuit Court to construct a groundbreaking history of slavery and legal culture within the American Confluence, a vast region where the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers converge. Formally divided between slave and free territories and states, the American Confluence was nevertheless a site where the borders between slavery and freedom, like the borders within the region itself, were fluid. Such ambiguity produced a radical indeterminacy of status, which, in turn, gave rise to a distinctive legal culture made manifest by the prosecution of hundreds of freedom suits, including the case that ultimately culminated in the landmark United States Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott vs Sandford. Challenging dominant trends in legal history, Before Dred Scott argues that this distinctive legal culture, above all, was defined by ordinary people's remarkable understanding of and appreciation for formal law.

Introduction
1. A radical indeterminacy of status
2. 'With the ease of a veteran litigant'
3. '[B]y the help of God and a good lawyer'
4. Slavery from liberty to equality
5. '[W]orking his emancipation'
6. Exploiting the uncertainties of federalism
7. Remembering slavery and freedom in the American Confluence
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Appendix.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], History of the Americas [HBJK]