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

Studies of disunion have long sought to explicate the significance of slavery in the border states. While much of the culpability for secession falls on the lower South, Stanley Harrold argues that decades of fighting over slavery in the border region of free and slave states profoundly influenced sectional tensions and the coming of the Civil War. In Border War, Harrold examines the struggle over slavery in the North-South borderland. In this region, decades of violence, which grew out of the proximity of free and slave labor societies, shaped perceptions of slavery's future and convinced the lower South it was necessary to secede.

While violent events such as Bleeding Kansas and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry received widespread national attention, Harrold demonstrates that these events were an escalation of an already existing border struggle that had been happening since the late eighteenth century. Central to the antagonism between the border South and lower North were runaway slaves, which placed slavery in direct contact with the lower North. This expansion of the institution into the region, which brought with it sporadic violent antiblack and anti-abolitionist riots, caused border Northerners to reckon with slavery's influence on their society. Slavery was no longer just a moral wrong in a distant land—it now directly affected those on the northern side of the sectional line—and antislavery and abolitionist groups publicized the damaging consequences of those proslavery initiatives. As Harrold illuminates, the abduction of African Americans and violent riots in cities such as Cincinnati and Philadelphia gave credence to the abolitionist accusations that slavery degraded their society and threatened the safety of white residents.

Harrold notes how the border South slaveholders, as well as the lower North residents, believed their culture was under attack. Proslavery Southerners thought that Northerners who aided runaway slaves and flouted fugitive slave laws needed punishment. Harrold contends that slaveholders increasingly perceived abolitionists as conducting a war of attrition. With antislavery literature circulating throughout the South and the growth of a violent resistance against slave catchers, border South politicians sought to protect their region and society from internal and external subversion.

Harrold's most compelling argument pertains to the border South residents who sought to keep slavery away from their Northern neighbors. Historians typically look at the timeline of secession to demonstrate the lower South's greater commitment to slavery, yet Harrold shows that this was not necessarily the case. While the border South was more economically tied to the North and had a larger free African American population and more supporters of gradual emancipation, Harrold argues it was the experiences within the border region that made border South residents slow to embrace secession as the surest way to defend slavery. To many in the border South, the prospect of secession made their situation more precarious. Because decades of interstate diplomacy had failed to recapture runaway slaves, who were a more realistic concern in the border South than in the lower South, border South politicians preferred federal action to protect slavery rather than designs of secession. Border South politicians put faith in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to improve the ability to recapture slaves. In the 1850s, however, the lower North's rebuff of the new federal law, along with the border conflict in Kansas and John Brown's raid, splintered the belief that the federal government was the best option. The lower South, observing the threat to slavery in the border South, viewed secession, rather than strengthened federal law, as the surest way to preserve the institution. As Harrold notes, if the border South had successfully defended slavery, the lower South would have had less reason to leave the Union.

Border War offers a refreshing perspective on disunion by examining the tensions in the North-South borderland. While Harrold treats too lightly the political and regional division over territorial expansion, he nonetheless provides a worthy contribution in understanding the...