- Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River by Matthew Salafia
In Slavery’s Borderland, Matthew Salafia scrutinizes the history of the Ohio River Valley and its people and communities, mostly from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. At the center of his story, however, is not a generalized account of a watery thoroughfare and the interconnections that it facilitated over time. Instead the author grapples with a more focused historical problem, one that is rich with historiographical potential. In eight thematically oriented chapters, Salafia assays if, when, and how the northern side of the river, specifically the southern regions of Ohio and Indiana, functioned as a barrier against slavery and a bastion of freedom from the age of territorial organization to the onset of the American Civil War. Salafia seeks to determine whether or not the ultimate establishment and early development of the non-slaveholding states of Ohio and Indiana effectively transformed the nature and meaning of the Ohio River from a simple geographical boundary into a more complex geopolitical [End Page 94] border. In order to arrive at firm conclusions, the author incorporates a comparative analysis throughout the monograph, frequently exploring a chapter theme within the context of slavery-related events in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, as well as cross-river relations among Ohioans, Indianans, and Kentuckians.
In stark contrast to the scholarship of Stanley Harrold, whose recent study, Border War: Fighting Over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2010), emphasizes a record of nearly constant antagonism between the states of the Lower North and Upper South over the issue of runaway slaves, Salafia stresses a very different set of interstate dynamics at work throughout the Ohio River Valley. Quite simply, he complicates the interactions among peoples on both sides of the river border by underscoring that the latter acted as a force of division and unification, a place of confrontation and accommodation. Although such dualisms figure prominently in a number of the chapters, the book itself essentially privileges one of the two opposing elements as characterizing the area. Cross-river legislative and judicial disputes notwithstanding—especially concerning the subject of fugitive slaves and their reclamation—Salafia argues on behalf of a centripetal Ohio River that had a greater tendency to bring white border inhabitants more closely together, rather than increasingly tearing them asunder. Whereas Harrold recognizes repeated conflict, Salafia discerns considerable compromise.
For Salafia, the white residents of Cincinnati, Ohio, of Madison, Indiana, and of Louisville, Kentucky, for example, had much in common. The river of commerce that they shared facilitated significant intraregional economic ties as well as similarly moderate views and conciliatory approaches toward local and national unrest. Neither radical abolitionist nor extreme secessionist movements flourished across the Ohio River Valley, as the author points out. Whereas the United States as a whole fragmented into warring sections by 1861, Salafia’s borderland, in the end, avoided irreparable fragmentation. The final chapter of the book, among the strongest of the eight, directly engages with how and why the communities of the Ohio River did not follow the country’s divisive social and political currents. Unionism, Salafia reasons, “triumphed in the borderland precisely because [white] residents divided over the best course for the region’s future.” “The absence of consensus,” he adds, “prevented any one group from dominating, and therefore conflict required resolution and, ultimately, accommodation” (216).
Yet, this is not a scholarly tale about the unifying role of commerce per se, for Salafia more provocatively indicates that the decades-long desire of white Indianans and Ohioans to deter the cross-border migrations of African Americans coincided with the intentions of slaveholding Kentuckians to prevent the cross-border escapes of their black bondsmen. In the author’s estimation, the Ohio River boundary that demarcated the outer limits of perpetual enslavement did not represent an uncomplicated threshold for a new birth of freedom. Rather, based on his reading of a variety of fugitive slave narratives...