Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff already is running for the U.S. Senate. But he plans to start a new campaign Tuesday: the national launch of his new historical novel, "Am I Not a Man, the Dred Scott Story," about the famous slave who sued for freedom.

Shurtleff is trying to unseat Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, who recently launched a book himself: "Leap of Faith," which defends the Book of Mormon against allegations of forgery. Now Bennett and Shurtleff can compete for book sales as well as votes.

From 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. today at The Gateway Barnes & Noble store in Salt Lake City, Shurtleff will officially launch the sale of his book with a reading, book-signing, a visit by Scott's great-granddaughter (Lynne Johnson) and singing by the Calvary Baptist Church choir.

So why did a white man from Utah decide to tell the slave's story and delve so deeply into it that he visited all the key locations of Scott's life and studied period writing closely so he could show the accent of slaves?

"When I was a new attorney general, I was preparing some PowerPoints about different famous cases," he said. "I get lots of speaking opportunities."

So he looked again at the Scott case, which he said he studied in law school mostly because it showed that the Supreme Court could overturn a major act of Congress (the Missouri Compromise).

"It suddenly struck me: Who was Dred Scott? Who was this slave who had the audacity to think he could sue for his freedom through the white man's court system, and the courage to keep that up for 11 years? I really started wondering about him," Shurtleff said.

Shurtleff found that little had been written about Scott, and Scott himself was illiterate. Shurtleff found that opinions of Scott ranged from "he was shiftless and lazy" to that he had "high intellect and courage."

"I wanted to get to the truth of it, out of curiosity," Shurtleff said. "So I embarked on a research project and started thinking, I need to tell this story to everybody."

In 2002, he was at a conference in Washington, D.C., and decided "to take an extra day and go down to southern Virginia, called Southampton County, where he was born, and do a little research," he said. "That just got me going."

Shurtleff went to the cotton fields and swamps there. Soon, he would visit a slave cemetery in Alabama where Scott's brother is buried. Later, Shurtleff sprained his ankle on the riverboat quay in St. Louis where Scott worked. Shurtleff went to where Scott met his wife in Minnesota. He went to the Missouri courthouse where Scott won, then lost, his freedom.

And in March 2007, on the 150th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision bearing Scott's name, Shurtleff stood with Scott's great-granddaughter in the old Supreme Court chamber in the U.S. Capitol where the decision was issued.

Shurtleff said he decided to write the book as a historical novel instead of a straight history because "I want more people to read it. I think as historical fiction, it makes the story come alive more than a straight biography. I want Dred Scott to be a hero who everyone knows."

The attorney general added that a straight biography actually would have been easier, "because creating conversations, creating settings, creating romance when he falls in love with his wife, actually re-creating a scene where he is whipped or beaten, to fictionalize those accounts and bring it to life was much more difficult."

Shurtleff said Scott was a hero because "he was a man who believed in the court system."

Shurtleff said Scott was a house slave, sort of an aide to his first master, and they traveled to court together often. "So I think it was there that he started to figure out that courts meant something, that you're supposed to get justice there."

Shurtleff said at one point he stopped writing the book. "I thought, 'Who am I to tell this story?' I really started to doubt myself. I'm a white man from Utah. Do I have any credibility? Do I have the ability to tell the story of a slave?"

Because of Shurtleff's research, he was still making scholarly presentations on Scott at the sesquicentennial of the famous decision, and one presentation included Johnson, Scott's great-granddaughter. She asked him why he had not finished the book by the decision's 150th anniversary, as he earlier had said was his hope.

Shurtleff said he shared his doubts with her, and she offered to read what he had written to give her honest opinion. "She called back a week later crying and said she felt that nobody could tell it better than me. That gave me the courage to start writing again."

As Bennett has said about his book, Shurtleff said he never planned to have the book come out during his political campaign for the Senate.

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Shurtleff said he originally had hoped to complete the book by the case's 150th anniversary. Later, when he started writing again, he was in a motorcycle accident that had him on powerful painkillers for a year and a half, and he said he found he could not write until he was off them.

"It so happened that it coincided with the decision I was going to run for the Senate. It was a coincidence," he said.

Shurtleff has numerous book signings planned the rest of the year, he said, "mostly on weekends, mostly in Costcos."

e-mail: lee@desnews.com

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