Dissertation: Bound Together: Masters and Slaves on the Kansas-Missouri Border, 1825-1865

Argument and Chapter Outline

This work uses the Kansas-Missouri border—a unique site of conflict and turmoil over the extension of slavery—as a microcosm of how slavery in the American West differed from the established institution associated with the South. It focuses on the Missouri counties of Buchanan, Platte, Clay, Jackson, Cass, Bates, and Vernon, and the Kansas counties of Atchison, Leavenworth, Jefferson, Shawnee, Douglas, Wyandotte, Johnson, Miami, Linn, and Bourbon.  I argue that slavery was far more central to the establishment of these border counties than historians have previously thought.  In fact, a high proportion of the leading men in each of these counties—those who served as legislative representatives, ministers, marshals, or judges—were slaveholders.  These well-placed individuals strove to perpetuate the slave system even in the midst of the growing conflict over slavery’s continued existence. 

Furthermore, a social geography of labor illustrates how slavery in this region exhibited a tension wherein slaves and slaveowners struggled for control over movement and space.  Slaveholders did maintain tighter bonds with their slaves due to the nature of small-scale slaveholding, a relationship which could often foster trust, but yet these same slaveholders felt threatened by the proximity of free states.  Slaveholders were even more adamant about perpetuating the system and controlling slave movement because freedom was an immediate possibility.  Slave agency, however, dictated that this was more negotiation than the hegemonic function of the slaveholding society, law, and government.  Unlike other studies of this region that focus on political developments leading up to the sectional crisis, I place the experience of African-Americans at the front and center of this story in order to uncover the hidden voices of these men and women and to prove that slaves were not marginal to westward settlement, Bleeding Kansas or the Civil War.

Each chapter portrays how slavery functioned at a cultural crossroads and scrutinizes historians’ previously held assumptions about the African American experience on the Kansas-Missouri line.  Chapter 1, “Westward Bound: Southern Settlement on the Western Frontier, 1825-1845,” traces American settlement on the border and the founding of early counties in Missouri. In addition to settlement by white slaveowners and enslaved blacks, some native tribes who relocated to Indian Territory after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, like the Wyandotte and Shawnee, had a history of slaveholding that extended into their post-removal period. The fledgling communities that sprouted along the border with Indian Territory found their footing thanks to slaveholders who brought their Southern slaveholding culture with them as they emigrated to the frontier.

The second chapter, “Missouri’s Little Dixie: The Creation of a Western Slave Society, 1845-1854,” covers the development and solidification of slavery as a central component of government and society on the frontier, beginning in the mid-1840s when these counties saw a sharp increase in emigration.  During this period slaveholders sought to perpetuate the slave system, even as slaves strove to resist planters’ control and carve out a limited degree of independence within the peculiar institution.  Although small-scale slaveholding was indeed the norm on the border, this chapter will also illustrate the similarities between slavery in this region and slavery in the rest of the South. 

The third chapter, “Contested Ground: The Slave Experience During Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861,” describes how slavery functioned during the heated crisis that eventually spawned the Civil War.  The doctrine of popular sovereignty, the brainchild of Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, turned Kansas Territory into a battleground over the extension of slavery.  While the rhetoric of free-soil proponents and pro-slavery supporters dominated the country’s perceptions of this contest, the true character of the conflict cannot be understood without a thorough examination of how slavery functioned at the ground level.

Chapter 4, “Contexts for Movement: The Social Geography of Slave Labor, 1854-1861,” relies on a case study of slaveholding families who are representative of the slaveholding population on the Kansas-Missouri line.  I trace these families’ settlement in the region and their relationship and proximity to other slaveholding farms through the use of census data, land deeds, and plat maps.  It also discusses the four contexts for slaves’ movement: emigration, sale, hiring or sharing of slave labor, and escape on the Underground Railroad.  Slaveholders both literally and figuratively reproduced the slave system by regulating slave movements, even as slaves themselves negotiated their own understandings of place. 

The fifth and final chapter, “Entering the Promised Land: The Black Experience in the Civil War Years, 1861-1865,” brings this story to a close by examining the mass self-emancipation that shaped African American life on the border during this tumultuous conflict.  Former slaves made their way to Kansas independently, hurried to safety behind Union lines, and some men enlisted in the military hoping to bring about the ultimate freedom for their people. 

Slave Hiring, Gendered Divisions of Labor, and Female Domestics in Central Missouri, 1821-1861

This essay examines the relationship between slave-hiring practices and gendered assumptions about male and female labor, focusing particularly on central Missouri during the antebellum period.  I argue that the popularity and availability of female domestics on the slave-hiring market raises profound questions about the unique benefits of female slave labor.  While the field labor of male slaves made a noticeable contribution to the status and wealth of their owner or temporary master, often a female slave domestic’s labor contributed little to their master’s economic solvency.  So why then, was the hiring of slave women as popular, if not more popular, than that of male slaves?  I contend that white mistresses in particular were keen on improving their social standing, seeing the addition of a female domestic to their work force as a means of lightening their own workload and adopting a managerial role.  Frequently for non-slaveholding families who lacked the means to purchase a slave, hiring provided them with passage—albeit fleeting passage—into the class of slaveholders.  Thus, slave hiring brought issues of race, gender and class together to form an intricate web of social relations.

Treasonous Patriots: The Secret Committee of Six and Violent Abolitionism

Master's thesis, completed at The College of William and Mary in 2005.

In this thesis, I examine how the Secret Committee of Six, a group of radical abolitionists who funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, defined their role in the greater movement for black emancipation.  I present a before-and-after picture of the guiding principles and motivations that drove these six men, particularly their growing acceptance of violent means.  I conclude that the Six perceived their role in abolitionism differently after the raid.  Before the incident at Harper’s Ferry, all of the Six were active in the abolitionist movement, and for the most part they remained active in the years after the raid.  After 1859, however, the nature of sectional relations had been altered so dramatically that abolitionists had to adjust their thinking.  Thus, the Six began to see their role in the movement in a new light.  Furthermore, the Six did not significantly alter their attitudes toward militant abolitionism—but, now that they had seen the far-reaching consequences of violence, they were somewhat less comfortable with its use.  Still, none of them denied that violence was indeed necessary for the downfall of the slave system.