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  • On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865
  • Louis S. Gerteis
On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865. Diane Mutti Burke. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. ISBN 978-8203-3683-1, 368 pp., paper, $24.95.

A striking photograph appears on the cover (and opposite page 158) of Diane Mutti Burke's graceful and comprehensive exploration of small-slaveholding households in Missouri. Taken in the late 1850s, it shows a young black nursemaid seated with a white male child on her lap. The child gazes contentedly at the camera, but the girl casts an apprehensive glance to one side. The photographic portrayal of a relationship between a white child and a black nursemaid is interesting but not unusual—slave nursemaids were common in the antebellum South. What is striking about the Missouri photograph is its fusion of domestic intimacy and masterdom, of white contentment and black apprehension. This fusion lies at the heart of Burke's study.

Slaves in Missouri were literally part of their masters' families. Slave families worked alongside white families and lived in cabins immediately behind the main houses. Masters typically provided their slaves with garden plots and worked and lived in close proximity to their human property. For the parents of the white child in the photograph, the image must have reinforced what they cherished as the mildness and humaneness of slavery in Missouri. Whites understood the slaveholding culture in Missouri to be domestic in nature, in contrast to the commercial character of slavery in the Deep South. Domesticity and intimacy could benefit slaves, who consumed the same food they prepared for their masters' families and who could gain a degree of authority as trusted managers of farms and homes. But intimacy also bred cruelty, and Missouri slaves lived almost entirely under the scrutiny of their masters. The apprehension expressed by the slave girl in the photograph underscores Burke's conclusion that, overall, the domesticity of small-slaveholding households "had profoundly negative consequences for Missouri slaves" (187).

Missouri's small-slaveholding households presented the enslaved with enormous challenges. Slave parents typically lived in separate households. Fathers visited mothers and children one day a week, but otherwise lived apart. As Burke concludes, "black Missourians struggled—and often succeeded—to maintain family and community ties in the absence of residential nuclear families and slave-quarter communities" (6). As slavery came to an end, blacks eagerly worked to unite their families. In particular, the families of black soldiers created extensive records as they identified for federal authorities family groups for the purpose of securing pension benefits. It was a testament to the slaves' successes [End Page 269] in maintaining family ties that black and white neighbors recognized distinct slave couples and their families despite their separation as slaves.

Like the majority of slaveholders across the South, each Missourian owned, on average, five slaves. Outside of Missouri these small slaveholders were marginalized by the power of the planter elites. In Missouri, by contrast, slavery benefited the common man, and the common man vehemently defended a labor system that allowed him to pursue avenues of economic and social advancement that were not available to him elsewhere in the South.

Large planters simply did not migrate to Missouri, and the small planters who moved into the rich agricultural lands of the Missouri Valley lived in a social setting created by small-scale slavery. Slaveholding farmers settled in Missouri's riverine lands and became especially prominent in the central section of the state known as "Little Dixie." Unlike cotton planters in the Deep South, Missouri's farmers employed their slave labor to raise corn, grains, and livestock. With easy access to downstream markets, they also profitably produced tobacco and hemp as cash crops. Missouri slaveholders found important allies among non-slave-owning farmers who actively participated in the slaveholding culture by hiring surplus slave labor. Slavery in Missouri supported a mixed agricultural economy and a social structure that wove slavery into the developing fabric of midwestern small-farm and small-town life.

In Little Dixie, Missouri slaveholding culture remained comfortably insulated from competing influences, and it was from this region that Missouri's...

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