On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865
- ISBN-10
- 0820337366
- ISBN-13
- 9780820337364
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 368
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2010-12-01
- Publisher
- University of Georgia Press
- Author
- Diane Mutti Burke
Description
On Slavery’s Border is a bottom-up examination of how slavery and slaveholding were influenced by both the geography and the scale of the slaveholding enterprise. Missouri’s strategic access to important waterways made it a key site at the periphery of the Atlantic world. By the time of statehood in 1821, people were moving there in large numbers, especially from the upper South, hoping to replicate the slave society they’d left behind. Diane Mutti Burke focuses on the Missouri counties located along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to investigate small-scale slavery at the level of the household and neighborhood. She examines such topics as small slaveholders’ child-rearing and fiscal strategies, the economics of slavery, relations between slaves and owners, the challenges faced by slave families, sociability among enslaved and free Missourians within rural neighborhoods, and the disintegration of slavery during the Civil War. Mutti Burke argues that economic and social factors gave Missouri slavery an especially intimate quality. Owners directly oversaw their slaves and lived in close proximity with them, sometimes in the same building. White Missourians believed this made for a milder version of bondage. Some slaves, who expressed fear of being sold further south, seemed to agree. Mutti Burke reveals, however, that while small slaveholding created some advantages for slaves, it also made them more vulnerable to abuse and interference in their personal lives. In a region with easy access to the free states, the perception that slavery was threatened spawned white anxiety, which frequently led to violent reassertions of supremacy.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War
By Stanley HarroldHere, Stanley Harrold explores the border struggle itself, the dramatic incidents that comprised it, and its role in the complex dynamics leading to the Civil War.
-
Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras
By Kristen EppsB. W. Lewis of Glasgow, Missouri, wrote to the governor of Kansas in August 1863, lamenting that almost every night there were at least a handful of slaves who fled from their owners.
-
Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border
By Michael WoodsA key supporter of the “internal” thesis has been Michael Fellman, whose Inside War (1989) revived the study of Missouri's brutal Civil War history.66 Deeply influenced by the trauma of the Vietnam War, Fellman saw war—including the ...
-
A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South
By Michael D. RobinsonDubin, Michael J. Party Affiliations in the State Legislatures: A Year by Year Summary, 1796–2006. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. — — — . United States Congressional Elections, 1787–1997: The Official Results of the Elections of the ...
-
The Border States: Their Power and Duty in the Present Disordered Condition of the Country
By John Pendleton KennedyThe Border States: Their Power and Duty in the Present Disordered Condition of the Country
-
Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border
By Jonathan Earle, Diane Mutti BurkeThe fifteen essays together explain why the divisiveness was so bitter and persisted so long, still influencing attitudes 150 years later"--
-
Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri
By Aaron AstorBy far the most complex examination to date, the book sharply focuses on the "borderland" between the free North and the Confederate South.
-
Border Methodism and Border Slavery: Being a Statement and Review of the Action of the Philadelphia Annual Conference Concerning Slavery,...
By J. Mayland M'CarterAbout the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work.
-
A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910
By Steven HahnThey included James Beekman, William E. Dodge, Anson Phelps Stokes, John Jacob Astor, J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry duPont, August Belmont, Cyrus Field, Russell Sage, and Jay Gould. Their vision was robust. As one banker who had aided the ...
-
Ransom Slavery Along the Ottoman Borders: (Early Fifteenth - Early Eighteenth Centuries)
By Geza David, Pál FodorThe volume is an ambitious attempt to give a comprehensive picture of trade in captives along the European borders of the Ottoman Empire, especially in Central Europe.