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  • The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law ed. by David Thomas Konig, Paul Finkelman, and Christopher Alan Bracey
  • Michael A. Morrison
The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law. Ed. David Thomas Konig, Paul Finkelman, and Christopher Alan Bracey. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8124-1912-0, 292 pp., paper, $26.95.

This collection of eclectic and stimulating essays emerged from a scholarly symposium held at Washington University Law School in 2007 that commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision. The participants were historians, legal scholars, and justices; the chapters reflect that diversity of perspectives. Although the essays do not directly interact with one another to fashion an overarching dialogue or narrative, they do cluster around broad themes to give a general coherence to the whole that is often missing in collections of published conference papers. One might quibble with the placement of certain entries (and I will), nevertheless, separately and together the papers published in this anthology effectively use the Dred Scott case to offer thought-provoking perspectives on the intersections of history, race, and the law.

Paul Finkelman's chapter, which functions as the conclusion to the collection, provides the broadest historical context of the origins, the legal essence, Roger Taney's objectives, and the political consequences of the case. His handling of the evolution and details of the case is at once clear and nuanced. Although Finkelman travels territory well known to historians, his essay should have provided the introduction and context for the first two sections that focus on the power of the past and the historical legacy of Dred Scott. Similarly, the essay by Michael Wolff that precedes Finkelman's and that situates Dred Scott within the context of Missouri politics logically and thematically, adds depth to the national historical narrative and thus functions better as a state-level introduction to the case rather than a summation of its significance.

David Konig and Adam Arenson concentrate on the "power of the past" as it shaped the legacy of Taney's decision and that of Dred Scott himself. Konig is less concerned with Taney's legal doctrine than his "simplistic version of a complex past" that had the intent and effect of excluding all "African Americans, slave or free, from any rights specified in the Constitution" (10-11). If Taney was determined to eliminate African Americans as citizens from the nation's past, Arenson's poignant essay shows that while the case persisted in the nation's collective memory (albeit uneasily in the era of Reconstruction), "the efforts and dreams of Dred and Harriet Scott have been [End Page 379] forgotten, discounted, or excluded, even as they ostensibly have been remembered" (40-41).

Mark Graber, Louis Gerteis, Austin Allen, and Daniel Hamilton explore facets of the legacy of Dred Scott over time. Looking at the immediate impact of the case on domestic politics, Graber takes a critical view (in the fullest sense of the concept) of Lincoln's middle ground between Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty (which offered the prospect of slavery's westward and southward expansion) and John Brown's use of violence to promote the abolition of the institution. Lincoln's commitment to freeing the slaves peacefully within the law and his focus on the expansion of slavery, Graber concludes, "offered almost nothing of value to persons enslaved before the Civil War" (62). Gerteis and Hamilton explore the way the issue of citizenship of African Americans, which lay at the heart of Taney's opinion, continued to bedevil politics and the law following the Civil War. Gerteis surveys the uncertain and problematic course of emancipation in Missouri. He argues that while antislavery politicians like Frank Blair Jr. could agree that Taney's proslavery nationalism died with the Confederacy, and the institution itself with the Thirteenth Amendment, they continued to be hostile to citizenship rights for African Americans. Hamilton contends that some lower courts were willing to read the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth Amendments broadly—erasing the status of enslaved African Americans as property from the nation's past. The Supreme Court's ruling in contested slavery-sale...

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