MORE FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Dave Hardy’s Dred Scott: The Inside Story. I read it last night and it reads like a mystery thriller. No, seriously, there are lots of longstanding questions about the Dred Scott case, and Hardy has dug up some answers.

Plus, I love this vignette about John Sanford’s brother in law, an anti-slavery member of Congress named Dr. Calvin Chaffee.

It related one incident by Rep. Preston Brooks, who had severely beaten Sen. Charles Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor. Brooks, drunk, told Chafee, “I thrashed one Massachusetts man today, and I’d like to thrash another.”

Chaffee responded by buying a revolver, the story continued, adding that Rep. Aiken of South Carolina saw Chaffee slide the revolver out of his pocket and into his desk on the House floor. Startled, Aiken asked if Chaffee was ready to use it and Chaffee responded, “If any of your chivalry irritate me, I shall certainly use this revolver.” [The report concluded] “After that, Dr. Chaffee’s southern friends were not only civil but cordial.”

As a man who might have been in Congress said in the following century, you get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. And they made Massachusetts men of stouter stuff back in those days, apparently.

I also like Hardy’s description of Scott’s attorney, Roswell Field: “He seems to have been the type of attorney that appellate lawyers dread: An idealist. A fellow that believes that if an impartial view of the law favors his side, he must inevitably win.” Hardy, no slouch of an attorney himself, knows whereof he speaks.