You probably can’t tell this from reading this blog, but I used to teach (as a TA, but still, 3-4 classroom hours a week) a college class on American constitutional history (and political science and economics). You want to know how the Constitution came about, and how it’s evolved since then? I’m your lady.
Abolitionists (specifically William Lloyd Garrison) called the original Constitution “A compact with hell.” (He was a fiery type.) The practice of slavery was antithetical to the principles the Union was founded upon.
Mark Shurtleff’s new novel, Am I Not A Man? The Dred Scott Story, tell the story of a landmark case in constitutional support for slavery.
Dred Scott, his wife and two daughters (one of whom was born in free territory) were taken to a free territory by their master. The legal precedent at the time was “once free, always free”—if a master took a slave to a free state/territory, they were considered freed, and if they returned to a slave state, they must be released.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court reversed this decision, relegating the African Americans to the status of property, not human before the law in 1857. Although later freed (because his widowed owner remarried to a prominent abolitionist Congressman), Dred died before the beginning of the bloodiest war in American history, the 13th Amendment (which abolished slavery—not the Emancipation Proclamation, folks!), and the 14th Amendment (which made former slaves full citizens—well, the men, anyway. While the 15th Amendment gave freed slaves the right to vote, women would wait another 60 years for the vote.).
Although this obviously isn’t something we should be proud of, it’s important to remember and to examine the failings in our history. The Constitution did inculcate slavery in the founding laws of our land. However, the Constitution is a flexible, living document, and it was amended to overrule the Dred Scott decision.
The Dred Scott Story tells the story of not only this trial, but of the slave who would take his challenge to the highest court in the land.
It’s an important story, and I think this is the fullest fictionalized treatment that the story had received. Sometimes the story was a little more concerned with telling us history than making history compelling by focusing on the characters. A few times we veered into melodrama, and occasionally Dred came off as a little too much of the “noble savage” archetype.
But it’s not hard to overlook those things (and because I received an ARC, I was probably more harsh than I would be if I had picked up the book on my own). Edited to add: the more I’ve considered this review, I realized that I wanted to add that this book really does make Dred Scott come alive. And in the end, that is how we can make history accessible, and truly learn from it, in a way no other words on a page can—through the eyes of someone who was there. (Though I really wanted there to be a historical note—I always wonder what details were real, and which ones were invented in a historical novel!)
This story is one that we should all know and understand, so that we can recognize our historical collective shortcomings, and never allow that kind of injustice to be perpetuated again.
