Browsing the spring/summer Oxford University Press catalog I see that Lea VanderVelde's Redemption
Songs: Courtroom Stories
of Slavery will be out next year. Cribbing now from the catalog description:
There is no more legendary case in American legal history than Dred Scott v.
Sanford. An extraordinary example of a slave suing his master for freedom,
it led to a devastating pro-slavery ruling by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the
Supreme Court and helped precipitate the Civil War. But was it so remarkable?
Did others fight for liberty in court?
In Redemption Songs,
legal scholar Lea VanderVelde unearths the astonishing history of how slaves
challenged the "peculiar institution" with that most American of weapons,
litigation. The author, together with Missouri's state archivist and other
researchers, found roughly 300 "freedom suits" filed in St. Louis between 1814
and 1860. More than 100 ended with the words, "Plaintiff be liberated and
entirely set free from the defendant." Slaves based their claims on four
grounds: they were Native Americans, previously had been free, had lived in free
territory, or had a free mother. VanderVelde selects a dozen lawsuits from
across this period for close examination; each opens a window on a closed world
of oppression-and defiance. Here, for example, is the saga of Moses Shipman;
freed by Revolutionary War veteran David Shipman, he fled from Kentucky to
Illinois in the 1820s, was kidnapped with his family, and dragged back to St.
Louis. Here, too, is the story of Leah Charleville, a wily survivor living in a
shadowy world of illegality, playing off two free black men as her lovers and
hosting a ring of thieves at her boarding house. Savvy in the ways of the law,
she went to court four times, securing freedom for herself and her
children.
With deep appreciation for the courage required for a slave to
challenge a master in court, VanderVelde reshapes our understanding of border-state
slavery and the impact of the seemingly powerless on American law.
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