The ragged edge of freedom : race, capitalism, and class struggle in slavery's borderland / Matthew E. Stanley

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stanley, Matthew E., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Working class African Americans--Middle West--History.

Working class African Americans.

Working class--Middle West--History.

Working class.

Industrial relations--Middle West--History.

Industrial relations.

Social conflict--Middle West--History.

Social conflict.

Capitalism--Middle West--History.

Capitalism.

Racism--Economic aspects--Middle West--History.

Racism.

Middle West--Race relations--History.

Middle West.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations, map

Other Title:

Race, capitalism, and class struggle in slavery's borderland

Place of Publication:

New York : Monthly Review Press, [2026]

Summary:

"The Ragged Edge of Freedom explores the long shadow of slavery in the Lower Midwest. In the decades after the Civil War, elites in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois constantly raised the specter of "cheap" Black labor to divide workers, discipline markets, and gain political advantage. At the same time, powerful outsiders depicted the borderland as dirty and degraded, pathologizing the region's working poor through a rising capitalist ideology that linked a human's worth to their economic productivity. Desperate to maintain their precarious standing and avert the phantasma of "negro invasion," countless Lower Midwesterners envisioned a republic of "free white labor" predicated on the ruthless exclusion of Black "competition." Yet, as Matthew Stanley demonstrates, racial division is only one part of this story, as class-based interracialism materialized in unlikely places and against impossible odds. In the heat of border-making and white supremacist violence, ordinary people challenged the free white labor consensus--through bottom-up struggle over shared material goals. From settler dispossession through the age of mass incarceration and deindustrialization, this absorbing book recounts dramatic and previously neglected clashes between workers and the formidable bastions of wealth and power. Stanley excavates the stories of abolitionists, freedpeople, agrarian populists, militant coal miners, and socialists, Black and white, who risked everything in defiance of the region's restrictive boundaries and its racial capitalist grip. Against a backdrop of blood-stained civil wars and riveting industrial battles in a pivotal yet often overlooked American region, The Ragged Edge of Freedom is a people's history--one of inspiration and urgency and complex resistance from below"-- Publisher's description

Contents:

Introduction : border thinking

Boundaries and bondage

What is black on one side of the line is white on the other

No more banks and no more Negroes

Turning black

The ghastly shadow

Exorcizing the ghost

Colluvies vitorum

The discipline of terror

Constructing a specter

Two worlds

The economics of race war

Kingdom of smoke

Epilogue : the present state

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 26, 2026).

Other Format:

Print version: Stanley, Matthew E. Ragged edge of freedom

ISBN:

9781685901561

1685901565

OCLC:

1580922248

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license