Men Are from Missouri, Women Are from Massachusetts: Perspectives on Narratives of Violence on the Border between Slavery and Freedom

12 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Men Are from Missouri, Women Are from Massachusetts Perspectives on Narratives of Violence on the Border between Slavery and Freedom Carol Lasser B order War is a remarkable book. In it, Stanley Harrold highlights the role of people of color and their allies in the struggle to liberate themselves, and the American nation, from slavery, making clear that the resulting violent conflict along the border was, to paraphrase Mao Tse-Tung, not a dinner party. Harrold replaces the recycled myths of the Underground Railroad with accounts of brutal confrontations in the Lower North between freedom seekers and free people who, sometimes aided by mixed-race allies, boldly resisted their would-be captors; in addition, he provides narratives of courageous northern raiders whose forays south liberated enslaved people. At last, scholars and students can turn to a book that takes seriously mobilized and coordinated resistance without fantasizing about signs, quilts, and station numbers. And what a wealth of evidence! Harrold has patiently scoured newspapers and personal papers, bringing to bear the fruits of over four decades of ongoing archival work across the borderlands and beyond. With compact, clear, and forceful writing, Harrold packs into just over two hundred pages his well-honed, sharp, and convincing argument. He asserts that the election of a Republican president who “might allow” the persistent and intractable struggle over slavery on the border to expand—not to the western boundaries as most historians of the politics of the 1850s have asserted, but rather into the South itself—pushed Lower South leaders finally to carry out their secession threat. In Harrold’s account, much of the Border South did not in the end join their Lower South counterparts, preferring instead to seek more security for the borders of slavery through federal legislation and enforcement. Thus, ironically, in Harrold’s account, when armed struggle over slavery that had long characterized the country burst into a certifiable civil war, the Lower South alienated key allies along the border, and in doing so set the stage for the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy. Critical, creative, thorough, provocative—this is an important book.1 The brief rumination that follows places this exceptional book in dialogue with another set of border stories, those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Having just completed co-teaching a course devoted entirely to this classic novel (in its own time CAROL LASSER SUMMER 2014 13 and in our time), I stand haunted by the legendary, albeit apocryphal, quip with which President Abraham Lincoln greeted his White House guest Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Even if Lincoln never said it, Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains the ur-text of the border war.2 First page of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY MEN ARE FROM MISSOURI, WOMEN ARE FROM MASSACHUSETTS 14 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Stowe gleaned her first-hand knowledge of slavery during her residence in Cincinnati, in the years 1832-1850, supplemented by a few brief trips across the river to Kentucky to visit acquaintances and former students. Stowe knew the violent confrontations along the border, having seen the 1836 anti-abolitionist riots that destroyed James Birney’s press. Stowe’s household staff included a Kentuckyborn woman of African descent who was claimed by a man vigorously asserting his legal ownership of the domestic, involving Stowe’s family in defensive feint and flight. In addition, a freedwoman, “Aunt Frankie,” assisted in Stowe’s home. And Stowe resided in Cincinnati in 1841, when a riot characterized by historian Nikki Taylor as a “race war” rocked the city again; she was no stranger to the border war.3 “Riot and mobs, confusion and bloodshed”: Account of the 1841 Cincinnati race riots from the Cincinnati Gazette, September 6, 1841. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER CAROL LASSER SUMMER 2014 15 Yet Stowe’s book and the actions it inspired do not enter into Harrold’s accounts. Why this omission? Granted Harrold focuses on forceful hostile encounters but his account raises questions: How did reports of those encounters shape perceptions of the...