Slavery on the periphery : the Kansas-Missouri border in the antebellum and Civil War eras / Kristen Epps.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Epps, Kristen, author.

Series:

Early American places

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Slavery--Kansas--19th century--History.

Slavery.

Slavery--Missouri--19th century--History.

History.

Missouri.

Kansas.

Physical Description:

xv, 265 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens, Georgia : The University of Georgia Press, [2016]

Summary:

Slavery on the Periphery focuses on nineteen counties on the Kansas-Missouri border, tracing slavery's rise and fall from the earliest years of American settlement through the Civil War along this critical geographical, political, and social fault line. Kristen Epps explores slavery's emergence from an upper South slaveholding culture and its development into a small-scale system characterized by slaves' diverse forms of employment, close contact between slaves and slaveholders, a robust hiring market, and the prevalence of abroad marriages. She demonstrates that space and place mattered to enslaved men and women most clearly because slave mobility provided a means of resistance to the strictures of daily life. Mobility was a medium for both negotiation and confrontation between slaves and slaveholders, and the ongoing political conflict between proslavery supporters and antislavery proponents opened new doors for such resistance. Slavery's expansion on the Kansas-Missouri border was no mere intellectual debate within the halls of Congress. Its horrors had become a visible presence in a region so torn by bloody conflict that it captivated the nineteenth-century American public.

Foregrounding African Americans' place in the border narrative illustrates how slavery's presence set the stage for the Civil War and emancipation here, as it did elsewhere in the United States.

Contents:

List of illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Westward ho! Southern settlement on the frontier, 1820-1840

Becoming little Dixie: the creation of a western slave society, 1840-1854

Contested ground: the enslaved experience during bleeding Kansas, 1854-1857

The tide turns: the demise of slavery on the border, 1857-1861

Entering the promised land: the Black experience in the Civil War years, 1861-1865

Epilogue

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-258) and index.

ISBN:

0820350508

9780820350509

OCLC:

944380357