Anne Twitty's Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857 is based on freedom suits brought before the St. Louis Circuit Court, a rich cache of materials recently microfilmed by the Missouri State Archives and made available to researchers. It is part of an emerging body of scholarship, including books by Kelly Kennington and Lea VanderVelde, which has drawn on these cases. Where VanderVelde focuses on the cases as human dramas in the effort to overturn slavery, both Twitty and Kennington pull back to write about the larger implications of the freedom suits for our understanding of the relationship between slavery and the law in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. Twitty's focus is the area that she calls the American Confluence: the region where the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers converge and which includes Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky. In this area, Twitty argues, the abmiguity between slavery and freedom produced a unique legal culture, one built around ordinary people's engagement with what she calls formal law.

As Twitty shows, there was no bright line between slavery and freedom in either law or practice in the American Confluence. African-Americans in the American Confluence moved back and forth between the poles of slavery and freedom. More to the point, they usually lived somewhere in between. Although the Northwest Territorial Ordinance prohibited slavery in some states of the region, settlers there already had slaves and did what they could to keep them. African-Americans who were technically free, for example, were kept in long-term labor contracts that were difficult to distinguish from slavery. That slavery was legal in neighboring states further muddied the waters, creating a situation in which enslaved and free African-Americans lived and worked in close proximity. The St. Louis freedom suits offer up extremely compelling stories of the resulting dynamics, and Twitty uses them effectively to reconstruct the complicated, lived experiences of African-Americans in the region.

That situation, Twitty argues, elevated the importance of law, particularly what she calls formal law: the law as defined in statutes, appellate decisions, and legal treatises, and prosecuted in legal arenas that abided by those rules. Ambiguity produced conflict, and people looked to formal law to resolve those conflicts. As such, the freedom suits reveal ordinary people's deep familiarity with the laws that defined slavery and labor relations, including indentured servitude. African-Americans, enslaved and free, as well as white masters and employers, were conversant with these rules, which they used strategically. The resulting cases challenge the assumption that legally recognized freedom was always the primary goal of those who were enslaved. As Twitty shows, the situation was far more complicated, because free status in law did not always result in the kinds of freedom that had meaning and substance in people's lives.

The strongest parts of Before Dred Scott are the in-depth case studies that Twitty uses to provide insight into the ways that people navigated labor relations in a time and place where coerced labor took many forms. Those cases underscore the inadequacies of the dichotomous conceptions of slavery and freedom that still frame so much of the historiography. They also convincingly demonstrate the importance of law, even to enslaved people.

Less convincing, however, are Twitty's efforts to distill those case studies into broader arguments about the operation of law. In her focus on the unique characteristics of the American Confluence, Twitty misses the opportunity to make a more important point: that the line between slavery and freedom was not clear elsewhere in the United States either. As such, St. Louis freedom suits are not so much an example of a unique legal culture in a particular georgraphic area as they are representative of law's place in American society more generally. Broadening the focus reveals the connections between Twitty's book and an established body of scholarship in legal history that has focused on the ways that people without rights have used the legal system: scholarship that includes the work of one of her mentors, Hendrick Hartog. That scholarship has recast our understanding of law and the legal system by highlighting the multiple sources of law in this period, the complicated dynamics among various legal jurisdictions and bodies of law, and the ways that ordinary people tried to use laws that did not represent their interests and a legal system that—regardless of the legal principles at play—was intended to keep them subordinated.

In that historiographical context, Twitty's sharp distinction between formal law and other legal practices is overdrawn. Although she positions her book as a critique of exactly this body of scholarship, her analysis actually tends to support its findings. Twitty shows that people not only knew about formal law, but also brought their own, conflicting ideas about law into the legal process. She also emphasizes the ways that processes based in formal law simultaenously upheld existing inequalities—including slavery—and offered spaces that people could use to their own advantage. What she calls formal law acquired meaning in a complicated legal context: one that brought that body of law into conversation with other sources of law. In fact, Twitty's analysis suggests that the boundaries of “formal law” were ultimately as fluid as the ones that distinguished slavery and freedom.