Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (review)

Stanley Harrold contends that violence over slavery was old news to border residents by 1860. In fact, he convincingly argues that Americans who resided on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon Line had been killing each other for decades. Focusing on the sectional tensions that existed between the “Border South” (Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware) and the “Lower North” (Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey), Harrold finds that fugitive slaves, their owners/pursuers, and their protectors engaged in a long, protracted battle over freedom and property rights that foreshadowed and, in fact, contributed to the onset of Civil War. As Border South residents sounded the alarm about “Negro stealers” and runaways, even after the federal government stepped in with a strengthened fugitive slave law in 1850, “Lower South politicians and journalists foresaw one tier of southern states after another falling to the forces of black freedom” (12). To stave off this domino effect, Harrold claims, southerners increasingly considered secession as a viable means of protecting their slave property.

Historians have often underestimated the importance of slavery in the border region to the sectional crisis, citing meager slave populations and unionist sentiment as reasons for its relatively benign importance in the acute political battles of the 1850s. Except for the border war in Missouri, which most historians place in the context of the debate over westward expansion, no historian has charted the “extended cross-border conflict” Harrold uncovers with vivid detail (14). Beginning in the 1820s (though Harrold identifies several incidents prior to that decade) and building in strength and frequency with each decade, slaves in the Border South and their black and white allies in the Lower North made it increasingly difficult for slave owners in the border region to recover and protect their slave property. Harrold narrates the numerous slave escapes that punctuated the region’s history, including the remarkable Pearl incident in 1848, when seventy-seven slaves escaped Washington, D.C., on board the Pearl, and more obscure conflicts like the gun battles between abolitionists and “negro-hunters” in Red Oak, Ohio, in 1844. One hopes that with Harrold’s dramatic retelling of the Pearl incident, complete with fleeing slaves stuffed into the hold of the Pearl, the ship’s capture by proslavery men, and the ensuing riot in D.C., which resulted in President Polk’s intervention, that the iconic Nat Turner will now have some company in the expanding narrative on antebellum slave resistance.

In addition to the valuable treasure trove of resistance stories, this work is also notable for its use of newspaper reports, an indication of the central importance of the nineteenth-century press in fomenting sectional discord. After the fighting at Red Oak, when a group of Kentuckians crossed into Ohio to retrieve six fugitive slaves and killed two of the abolitionists who housed them, the Liberator trumpeted that the “‘bloody tragedy, enacted on the free soil of Ohio, by a gang of Kentucky slaveholders’ [was] probably, but ‘the beginning of the end,’” while the Lexington (Kentucky) Observer claimed that “northern ‘slave-stealing miscreants,’ like those at Red Oak, had to be taught ‘a lesson which they will not forget’” (94–95). Similarly, the Chicago Western Citizen raised the rhetoric to a feverish pitch when it printed abolitionist Zebina Eastman’s call for Chicago’s “colored population” to resist the hated fugitive slave law: “While they do not propose to commit any act of violence unless driven to the wall, they will not suffer the new law to be executed upon their persons. In resisting this even to the death, they will be sustained by the omnipotent sentiment of the [white] citizens of Chicago” (150). Using both the abolitionist and mainstream press, Harrold thus highlights numerous examples of black-white alliances in resistance to slavery and illustrates that signal events like John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry were simply “the logical product...