« "Sorry, New York. The Second Amendment applies outside the home" | Main | South Dakota goes for "constitutional carry" »

My new book, on Dred Scott

My newest book is on Amazon -- Dred Scott: The Inside Story. And it is an inside story.

Scott's St. Louis attorney sued a New York City businessman, John Sanford, who had no claim to holding him in slavery, but stipulated that he did. Historians have debated the reason for that for 150 years. The most encyclopedic work on the subject, which won the Pulitzer for history, concludes we'll never know, but shouldn't assume collusion unless someone finds strong evidence proving it.

I found the evidence, an eyewitness who was in the room when the deal went down, and wrote about it a half-century later, in an unpublished autobiography housed in the New York Historical Society's Naval Collection. Sanford agreed to be the defendant in order to keep his sister's name out of the case and the newspapers, because she had married an antislavery Congressman. (It didn't work: a week after the decision, all the pro-slavery newspapers identified the couple as the owners and attacked him as a hypocrite). In the Lincoln-Douglas debates Douglas used the point repeatedly against Lincoln, arguing that the case couldn't have been an pro-slavery plot because Dred Scott was owned by an abolitionist.

That discovery requires a rewrite of history in another sense. The conventional history is that the case was filed in St. Louis, with local attorneys on either side. When it reached the Supreme Court, the pro-slavery side retained Reverdy Johnson, former Attorney General and the top Supreme Court advocate in the country, to come in and attack the Missouri Compromise and thus Congressional power to limit slavery in the territories. But I found Johnson was the man who persuaded Sanford to come into the case - meaning Johnson was planning the case even before it was filed. And planning an attack on the Missouri Compromise. Meaning he or others suckered Scott's attorney into filing, think the case involved a few narrow issues, when they were planning a much broader attack, and kept that secret until the Supreme Court argument.

I also found (though others have found this before) that President Buchanan was lobbying the Supreme Court to strike down the Compromise, and the pro-slavery justices were recruiting his help and informing him of the Court's deliberations.