Slavery on the Periphery

Kristen Epps complements the work of Abzuga (“Zu”) Adams, the librarian of the Kansas Historical Society, who, in the 1890s, collected meticulous records of slaves who had lived in Kansas. Epps proposes to extend this forgotten era by exploring nineteen counties along the Kansas-Missouri border between 1820 and 1865, and showing how slaves “negotiated the social terrain of this frontier society” (p. 2). Black and white settlers in the region were largely from the upper South. She emphasizes the way slavery shaped the region as well as how regional differences, including the western influence, formed slavery. The author discusses how slavery could flourish on the outskirts of American society, how slaves were central to the story of “bleeding Kansas” and the Civil War, and how mobility was a “core feature of slaves' experiences in the region” (ibid.). As in the upper South, whites created an economy and culture dominated by relatively small farms. Slaves had diverse forms of employment, close contact with whites, a robust hiring market, and a prevalence of marriages in which spouses lived in different households. Slaves and their owners regularly tested social and geographic boundaries. Before 1854, this frontier divided the United States and unsettled lands. After the passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act (which is, surprisingly, like the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision [1857], not given much attention here), the line became increasingly a front line separating freedom and slavery. Yet the boundary was not a natural one, like the Ohio River. Rather, it was an artifice that tied people along it together as much as it divided them about visions of a republic of free men or a republic of slaveholders

Archaeology · Compromise · Economic history · Ethnology · Frontier · Political science · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society