On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865

Notes

Notes Abbreviations Key AS George P. Rawick, The American Slave, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood , 1972). Most of the narratives were included in volume 11 and supplement, series 1, volume 2. The volumes and page numbers reference the George Rawick compiled collections rather than the original WPA narratives. I have indicated the volume and page numbers at the end of the citations (e.g., Marilda Pethy, AS, 11:277–82). DU Manuscript Department, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University , Durham, North Carolina. FSSP Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. JCHS Jackson County Historical Society, Independence, Missouri. MHM Missouri History Museum, Library and Research Center, St. Louis, Missouri. MSA Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri NA National Archives, Washington, D.C. pen., USCT 65 Pension Claims, United States Colored Infantry, 65th Regiment, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (I also have indicated the company in which the soldier served.) 314 / notes to introduction Provost Marshal Missouri’s Union Provost Marshal Papers: 1861—1866, Union Provost Marshals’ File of Papers Relating to Individual Civilians and Union Provost Marshals’ File of Papers Relating to Two or More Civilians, War Department Collection of Confederate Records , Record Group 109, National Archives, microfilm viewed at Missouri State Archives. WHMC Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Columbia, Missouri. WHMC–KC Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Kansas City, Missouri. Introduction 1. General John Gideon Haskell, then president of the Kansas State Historical Society , commented on slavery in western Missouri during the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the organization in January 1901. See Haskell, “The Passing of Slavery in Western Missouri,” 31, and Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 19. 2. Trexler, Slavery in Missouri. Bruce, The New Man. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 86. 3. Missouri Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Reminiscences of the Women of the Sixties. Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 19. Haskell, “The Passing of Slavery in Western Missouri.” See also Astor, “Belated Confederates.” 4. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chaps. 1–10. Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Dempsey, Searching for Jim. 5. Most of the Missouri WPA narratives are published in AS, vol. 11 and AS, supp. series 1, vol. 2. Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown (1849), 133. 6. Since the 1970s, historians have redefined the study of slavery and slaveholding in the American South. A sampling of the foundational literature on American slavery includes Blassingame, The Slave Community; Clinton, The Plantation Mistress; Escott, Slavery Remembered; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; and D. G. White, Ar’n’t I A Woman? 7. The definition of a plantation is a slaveholding of twenty or more slaves. In 1860, 12 percent of slaveholders in the Deep South owned at least twenty slaves, whereas only 4 percent did in Missouri. Not even 1 percent of slaveholders in Missouri owned fifty or more slaves. Three of the largest slaveholding counties in Missouri raised the percentage of planters in the state as a whole to 4 percent. In most slaveholding counties, closer to 2 percent of slaveholders were planters. For statistics on the size of slaveholdings and the number of slaves in Missouri, see Hilliard, Atlas of Antebellum Agriculture, 37–38; and Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie, 219–22. See also R. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 178–82. 8. James Oakes argues that small slaveholders, rather than planters, shaped southern society; however, he does not address the actual experiences of slaves living on farms. For a description of upwardly mobile Southerners see Oakes, The Ruling Race; and W. L. Johnson, Soul by Soul. 9. See E. Miller and Genovese, ed., Plantation, Town, and Country. A few historians notes to introduction / 315 have made some observations about small slaveholdings within their works on plantation slavery: Paul D. Escott, Eugene Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Peter Kolchin, for example. A number of studies of slavery in individual states were published early in the last century. A good example is Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 1804–1865, which was published in 1914. These early historians were influenced by the “plantation school” interpretation of slavery. Since the 1970s, there have been some excellent regional studies of slavery and slaveholding, including Campbell, An Empire for Slavery; Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South; Essah, A House Divided; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground; Hahn, The Roots...