The Gender of Freedom before Dred Scott

Former bondswoman and White House intimate Elizabeth Keckley authored one of the few extant postemancipation U.S. slave narratives,Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House(1868), as a defense of her patron, Mary Todd Lincoln, after the socalled old clothes scandal.¹ Critics often note in passing that Irene Sanford Emerson retained Keckley’s former master, Hugh A. Garland, as her counsel against Dred Scott in the initial trial that was to become infamous in the annals of U.S. constitutional history, yet few have explored Scott’s freedom suit as a broader context for understanding