Transatlantic Dimensions of the Border Wars in the Antebellum United States

20 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Transatlantic Dimensions of the Border Wars in the Antebellum United States Edward B. Rugemer J ames Brewer Stewart posed an important question at the July 2013 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) session on Stanley Harrold’s Border War that went largely unanswered during an otherwise vibrant discussion. “How do we reconcile the history told in Border War with the international antislavery movement?” Harrold’s work does not consider transatlantic dimensions; indeed, the geography of Harrold’s book lies on either side of the political border between the slaveholding states and the non-slaveholding states—the Lower North and the Border South—created by the gradual abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania (1780), the Northwest Ordinance (1787), and the Missouri Compromise (1820-1821). This band of territory about two hundred miles wide saw decades of armed conflict over slavery. This long-running “fight” over slavery stemmed from the bold efforts of enslaved black Americans to escape slavery by running across state lines, the largely illegal actions of abolitionist northerners to assist them, and the efforts of slaveholders to retrieve them, often by force of arms. Harrold persuasively argues that the “border war” that developed in this region, along with the failed attempts to resolve it through inter-state diplomacy and political bargaining, played a crucial role in the coming of the American Civil War.1 One of the most valuable contributions of BorderWar lies in the book’s capacity to transcend “the sequence” of national political events—the Missouri crisis, Texas annexation, the political crises of 1850, bloody Kansas, John Brown’s raid, and the election of 1860—that preoccupy most accounts of the coming of the Civil War. While these events were no doubt important, narratives organized around them have become a bit stale. By illuminating a long-term conflict that underlay the entire antebellum era, Harrold averts our attention from national politics and allows a deeper understanding of the conflict over slavery as it unfolded in the communities and neighborhoods along slavery’s border in the United States.2 Attention to the transatlantic dimensions of the antebellum period can provide similar nuance to how we understand the coming of the war. Violent conflicts over slavery took place well before the advent of the United States, and with the emergence of radical abolitionism in the 1780s, these conflicts intensified and did EDWARD B. RUGEMER SUMMER 2014 21 not end until the abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil in the late 1880s. Major developments such as the Haitian Revolution, the abolition of slavery in many parts of Spanish America during the wars for independence, British abolition in 1834, and French abolition in 1848 posed a constant counterpoint to Americans on either side of the slavery struggle in the United States—for those who hated slavery as well as those who hated abolitionists. This essay cannot consider all of these developments, but it seeks to build upon Border War by considering some of the transatlantic dimensions suggested by James Stewart’s question. It begins with a brief investigation of how the concept of a slavery border emerged in the British Empire on the eve of the American Revolution. It then considers the impact of Britain’s abolition of slavery on the abolitionist communities of the Lower North, and it briefly surveys some of the violent conflicts along the southernmost slavery border of the Old South, the border created by Britain’s abolition of slavery in the Caribbean. In short, this essay argues that the “border war” described by Harrold had important transatlantic dimensions that deeply influenced its participants. Attention to this broader history enriches our understanding of slavery’s borders and further explains the coming of America’s Civil War.3 Map of slaveholding and free labor states, c. 1855 (NewYork: Longmans, Green and Co., 1893). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER TRANSATLANTIC DIMENSIONS OF THE BORDER WARS IN THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES 22 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY In the Anglo-Atlantic world, the history of a political border defined by slavery goes back at least to 1772 when the Lord Chief Justice William Murray, Earl of Mansfield decided in Somerset v. Stewart that James Somerset, formerly a...