The simple title makes a powerful statement all by itself: "Mrs. Dred Scott." What eminent legal scholar Lea VanderVelde does in her exhaustively sourced treatment is shed light on the famous Supreme Court decision's principal from the perspective of the proverbial great woman behind the great man, a woman invisible on the legal complaint's face but transformative in her insistence on achieving her freedom.

The case is familiar to anybody who has seriously studied American history. A Missouri slave sued his master for his freedom, and the case worked its way up to the highest court in the land as Dred Scott v. Sanford. Scott's fight for freedom is widely regarded as the most momentous judicial event of the 19th century, even though the court ruled against him 7 to 2. According to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's majority opinion, Scott could not sue Sanford because Scott was not a U.S. citizen, and Scott was not a citizen because he was both a black man and a slave. Taney's conclusion, which went further to assert that black men "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," was at once a serious setback to abolitionists, an injection of buoyancy among slaveholders, and a constitutional crisis for the country. In declaring that African Americans were not citizens of the United States and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional as an act of Congress, the Court also was redefining the relationship between the states and the federal government, making possible the expansion of slavery into the territories. A few months after the decision, Scott's owner—the last of three whom Scott had attempted, at various points, to escape from, to buy his freedom from, and to sue—freed him. Scott continued to live in St. Louis with his wife and daughters until his death the next year; African Americans would not become full citizens of the United States until the ratification of the post Civil War Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868.

Those aspects of the Dred Scott story are well known. VanderVelde, a historian who writes widely in employment law, property law, legal history, and constitutional law, offers something new. Through the subtle but essential lens of a forgotten spouse, she invites readers to re-imagine the origins, currency, and legacy of what has been called the most disgraceful legal decision in the history of American jurisprudence.

This undertaking could not have been easy. Neither Harriet Robinson Scott nor her husband was literate, and almost no existing writings focus on Harriet. Nevertheless, VanderVelde, an evidentialist of the highest order, uses all kinds of information to piece together what life was like for Harriet Scott and what must have motivated her. Over the course of her life, Harriet lived in both free and slave territory, became a mother of two daughters, and cared for her aging husband until his death in 1858, engaging in the protracted and vexing legal battle for a substantial chunk of that time.  VanderVelde was resourceful in her investigation, taking advantage of the fact that Harriet and Dred lived in the households of highly influential persons, who did leave written records, thereby enabling more to be known about the Scotts than about many frontier slaves. Central to VanderVelde's exclusive findings were the copious journals of Harriet's owner, Lawrence Taliaferro, the significance of which, the author states, has "been overlooked by every previous historian of the Dred Scott case." VanderVelde also exploits the sexism of previous generations to develop her scoop: As she states in prefacing her work, "The very simple, almost obvious, idea that a wife's life circumstances were as significant to the context of the family's struggle for survival as her husband's has opened several additional avenues of archival research never before explored by historians of the famous case."

VanderVelde's groundbreaking book demonstrates the significance of gender in the historical development of rules in contracts, torts, and constitutional litigation, the substance of much of her previous scholarship. Having produced an impressive collection of other publications, VanderVelde prior to publishing this book played an important role in the discovery of almost 300 freedom suits brought by slaves in the St. Louis courts. That work takes form in her current book project, Redemption Songs: How Slaves Sued for Freedom in St. Louis Courts.

Like any effective lawyer, VanderVelde calls on the power of the written record in drawing careful and credible inferences to fill the holes in the story. Readers not accustomed to legal scholarship might find her narrative cluttered due to its frequent footnoting relating to the factual record. This style, however, is necessary for two reasons: to ground and amplify surprising but established facts, and to substantiate the otherwise-controversial inferences derived from them. Such asides, which appear among the 113 pages of notes complementing the 324 pages of main text, are the stuff of serious scholarship in the field of law. In the history-lesson context, the result of this form of writing is to surprise the reader into new thought as to the subject matter under examination. In Mrs. Dred Scott, readers are called upon to contemplate for themselves the extent to which Harriet's frontier experience as an antebellum slave (in contrast to her husband's rearing in Virginia and Alabama, the author points out) is worthy of depiction ("because it runs so counter to the predominant slave narrative," she argues), and they can answer that call by getting into the sources.

The documented facts include the rich conversations surrounding Harriet in, among other places, the influential home of her master, "recorded discourses," VanderVelde says, that must inevitably have shaped her impressions of the world, and that provided her with a language to organize her understanding of the world. At the same time, embracing "informed speculation … based on close study of the documentation of others most similarly situated," VanderVelde displays an authoritative command of the manifold new sources uncovered over her years of researching the law of slavery, including her having found, with other researchers, and analyzed those 300 slave petitions for freedom in the courts of Saint Louis. She lures readers into the logical thicket, challenging them in her introduction to "[r]ead carefully the list of citations, notes, and appendices to judge whether the implications have been fairly drawn."

The sweep of VanderVelde's fact-finding is vast. She locates Harriet's adolescent life in the 1830s Minnesota-Wisconsin frontier, and relocates her in slavery-era St. Louis, where she became well-known by midcentury as a result of the legal fight. Even though VanderVelde loses track of Harriet during the chaos of the Civil War and Reconstruction, she finds traces of her through a few entries in city directories. Harriet doesn't appear again in the historical record until her death on June 17, 1876, only days before the centennial celebration of the Union she had sought to make more perfect. No one knew where Harriet was buried until only a few years ago, when VanderVelde and a team of scholars unearthed a burial record in St. Louis's Greenwood Cemetery.

Reconstructing Harriet's saga through readings of court dockets, journals, military records, and store ledgers, VanderVelde is always careful in her treatment of the evidence and measured in her derived conclusions. She acknowledges that a deep understanding of Harriet's inner thoughts cannot presently be attempted: "[W]ithout letters, diaries, or speeches to draw on, the biography of an illiterate person cannot be the account of a deep inner life. That degree of privacy will always remain hers. Harriet left no first-person account of what she thought to be the critical turning points in her life."  Beyond that, VanderVelde is diligent in indicating what is speculation, making clear where direct facts and evidence are lacking. The only dialogue involving Harriet or Dred available to include in her work occurs in the first chapter and is taken from a newspaper account of an actual conversation with Harriet, the only existing first-person description of Harriet Scott by anyone who ever actually met her.

After her exhaustive study, VanderVelde's basic conclusion about Harriet Scott is relatively modest but nonetheless significant: "From all evidence, it was her idea to bring suit, and her determination carried her family through. Harriet didn't set out to change the world; she only sought to free her family and herself from slavery. Though she was illiterate, black—and hence perceived as different in the racial caste system of the times—the mother of two young children, and desperately poor, she challenged the claim that she and her family were slaves." Mrs. Dred Scott is a sophisticated reconstruction revealing a fundamental dimension of the Dred Scott saga. Through this book, readers are exposed to a woman who, like Dred Scott in the eyes of the court, has been persona non grata in the eyes of historians and the public since the 1860s. As a subordinate black woman who invoked law to achieve her freedom in a time such as hers, Harriet Scott can stand forever as a universal symbol of defiance and grace.

Amos Jones practices law in Washington, D.C.

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