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  • In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America by Kelly M. Kennington
  • Austin Allen (bio)
In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America. By Kelly M. Kennington. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Pp. xv, 290. $54.95 cloth; $28.95 paper)

Kelly M. Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott analyzes the 287 freedom suits that African American litigants pursued in St. Louis between 1810 and 1860. The city’s location along major transit routes running east, west, north, and south and its presence on the border between slavery and freedom gave rise to a variety of fact situations that, if litigated, may have established a freedom claim. St. Louis also hosted a black community that understood the law’s potential for negotiating the terms of enslavement and a legal profession willing to pursue freedom suits. But African American litigants formed the driving force behind those suits and Kennington argues that their participation in these cases shaped St. Louis’s legal culture.

Missouri policy toward freedom suits experienced two major periods of transformation. One followed statehood in the 1820s. The other [End Page 221] occurred in the late 1840s and 1850s and resulted in the Dred Scott case. Most of Kennington’s sources, however, fall between these two periods, so she approaches her topic thematically. After discussing the setting of antebellum St. Louis, Kennington explores enslaved people’s decision to bring suit. The city’s black community developed a consciousness about the right to sue for freedom. Potential litigants tapped into this knowledge and weighed their options, determining whether legal action offered a better option than, say, running away. If they decided to sue, black litigants exposed themselves to significant risks. Enslavers might retaliate with violence or by removing them from the city or selling them to someone in another state. Missouri law made provisions against such activity, but the safeguards did not always prove sufficient. Litigants in freedom claims also had access to a legal profession willing (or, in some cases, required) to take up their cases and see them through.

Freedom suits in St. Louis generally turned on some combination of three claims. Litigants asserted that they were born free and thus were illegally enslaved. Or they claimed to have been freed by will or some other agreement with an enslaver. Most often, however, they claimed that residence in free territory—usually in nearby Illinois— rendered them free. And the city’s freedom claimants appeared to have been successful. Kennington notes that thirty-eight perecent of the suits initiated in St. Louis resulted in freedom. Another thirty percent did not. (She could not determine the outcome of the remaining thirty-two of cases.)

In the Shadow of Dred Scott makes two historiographical contributions. One is specific to the study of the Dred Scott Case, which has generally focused on the handful of Missouri freedom suits that made their way to the state’s Supreme Court. Kennington’s study provides the best account of the social and legal context (as well as the inherent risks and personal dimensions) in which Dred Scott emerged. Second, the book contributes to a growing body of work on black litigants in the South. Kennington builds on Ariela Gross’s Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (2000) that studies the way in which enslaved people influenced the [End Page 222] legal process, usually by leveraging their status as property to exert an indirect pressure on the legal system. Much like Kimberly M. Welch does in Black Litigants in the Antebellum South (2017), however, Kennington focuses on more direct forms legal action in which African Americans asserted personhood. She emphasizes that claimants in St. Louis freedom cases foregrounded their character as persons and portrayed their treatment as property as a grievous wrong. In the hands of these claimants, the law became a powerful mechanism for African American agency and resistance to slavery.

There is little to criticize in this book. In the Shadow of Dred Scott is a fine piece of scholarship. Readers might wish...

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