Customer Reviews

Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Erase what you think you know about slavery, the Western frontier, the politics and the people who lived our history during the forty years prior to the Civil War, and do yourself a favor. Read this book. Ten years in the making, author Lea VanderVelde may well have written what is beyond any doubt the most important and thorough work on the personal lives of Harriet and Dred Scott that exists today. Ms. VanderVelde goes where few authors of historic works dare to go; she lifts her subjects from the text and revives them into the context of the events going on around them, balancing her meticulous research with insight and logic to draw some of the most realistic, moving, uncomfortable, and absorbing portraits of Harriet, Dred, Major Lawrence Taliaferro, John Emerson and others that I have ever had the pleasure to read. Her writing style is fluid, involving, and conveys her passion and commitment to telling Dred and Harriet's story the way it should be told. I had to put it down every few pages and step away to digest the implications of what I was reading. A surprising work.

We learn more than I thought possible about Dred Scott's wife. Vandervelde has assembled a picture of her life by delving deeply into the social and political history of her times. fascinating.

Reading this book was pure torture for me. I am a Black woman, some of whose ancestors were free people of color and some of whose ancestors were slaves. I wanted to like this book. But there was too much speculation and supposition and too much about people other than Harriet Robinson Scott or Dred Scott. It gave a picture of slave life in Indian country of Minnesota and in St. Louis. But it is not a biography of Harriet Robinson Scott.

It would probably have been a good novel.