Among the most infamous U.S. Supreme Court decisions is Dred Scott v. Sandford . Despite the case's signal importance as a turning point in America's history, the lives of the slave litigants have receded to the margins of the record, as conventional accounts have focused on the case's judges and lawyers. In telling the life of Harriet, Dred's wife and co-litigant in the case, this book provides a compensatory history to the generations of work that missed key sources only recently brought to light. Moreover, it gives insight into the reasons and ways that slaves used the courts to establish their freedom.
A remarkable piece of historical detective work, Mrs. Dred Scott chronicles Harriet's life from her adolescence on the 1830s Minnesota-Wisconsin frontier, to slavery-era St. Louis, through the eleven years of legal wrangling that ended with the high court's notorious decision. The book not only recovers her story, but also reveals that Harriet may well have been the lynchpin in this pivotal episode in American legal history.
Reconstructing Harriet Scott's life through innovative readings of journals, military records, court dockets, and even frontier store ledgers, VanderVelde offers a stunningly detailed account that is at once a rich portrait of slave life, an engrossing legal drama, and a provocative reassessment of a central event in U.S. constitutional history. More than a biography, the book is a deep social history that freshly illuminates some of the major issues confronting antebellum America, including the status of women, slaves, Free Blacks, and Native Americans.

Introduction
Chapter 1: Wife of a Celebrity
Chapter 2: 1835: Arriving on the Frontier
Chapter 3: Settling In
Chapter 4: Entertaining Guests at the Indian Agency
Chapter 5: Late Summer Harvest
Chapter 6: Wintering Over at St. Peter's Agency
Chapter 7: Winters Deep
Chapter 8: The Change of the Guard
Chapter 9: Celestial Explorers
Chapter 10: The Call of the Wood as a Prelude to Treaty
Chapter 11: A Treaty Made before Her Eyes
Chapter 12: The Master Departs, Together Alone
Chapter 13: Traveling the Length of the River
Chapter 14: New Baby in a New Land
Chapter 15: The Deteriorating Community
Chapter 16: Battles and Baptisms
Chapter 17: Taliaferro's Last Stand
Chapter 18: Leaving Minnesota Trying Courts: The Justice of Frontier Trials
Chapter 19: While the Doctor was Away: St. Louis, 1840-43
Chapter 20: The House of Chouteau
Chapter 21: Black Social Life of St. Louis
Chapter 22: The Doctor Returns
Chapter 23: 1843 Interlude: Jeff Barracks between Wars of National Expansion
Chapter 24: Harriet and Her Children in St. Louis
Chapter 25: The Courthouse and the Jail
Chapter 26: Other Matters at the Courthouse
Chapter 27: Filing Suit Again
Chapter 28: Trial by Pestilence, Trial by Fire
Chapter 29: Declared Free
Chapter 30: Missouri Changes its Course
Chapter 31: Before the High Court

Lea VanderVelde is Josephine Witte Professor of Law at the University of Iowa. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.