New Works about Slavery on the Antebellum Frontier

These two books on the subject of slavery in the Midwest have taken very different approaches. Race and Rights goes narrow, focusing on abolitionist sentiment in a few Illinois counties in the four decades bracketing the Civil War. Its focus is a social movement: how Illinois abolitionists rejected slavery as an idea. By limiting its scope in this way, Race and Rights is unable to reach more general conclusions about social change.

By contrast, Slavery’s Borderland focuses on the social reality of slaveholding and slave experience in a larger region, taking a wider view, both geographically and demographically. Its scope encompasses both banks of the Ohio River Valley. As such, the book is able to contrast the settlement and development of the legally free region on the river’s northern bank to that of the southern bank where slavery was legal. Ultimately, this approach pays off. Salafia adopts a methodology that alters our perspective on slavery and freedom divisions in the developing Midwest.¹

By starting with American settlement along the river, Matthew Salafia demonstrates that the region’s integrity as a river valley transcended the artificial legal divide between free and slave territory. Slavery’s Borderland also brings a considerable amount of new evidence to light and juxtaposes the previous evidence in interesting ways.

By seeing beyond the artificially drawn legal boundary between the free lands north of the Ohio River and the slave state, Kentucky, south of the river, he re-contextualizes the region as unified socially and economically. Salafia stresses how the functional significance of the river as a unifying artery of transportation preceded the legal divide and, in fact, provided such a strong interconnection that it survived even the national division during the Civil War to hold Kentucky in the Union. Salafia reminds us that before there were states—before there was any actual government to enforce a border between free territory and slave territory—the river unified its watershed region by facilitating transport along it and transit across it. The watershed was an intact, naturally drawn community. The watershed unified the community because river transport was so much easier than overland travel. Families often settled on both sides of the river and moved back and forth with their slaves.

Taking this approach, Salafia effectively overcomes the narrowed bracketing of history drawn and constrained by state borders. Frequently, that conventional bracketing of history over-determines the significance of state borders and excludes the significance of local events occurring just beyond those borders. For example, state histories sometimes fail to recognize that their founding families were also the founding families of other states as well, because the region’s earliest settlers were the only settlement influences over vast expanses that were not yet states. State borders only became significant as governing regimes decades later, when the state’s infrastructure and legislatures were established. By examining the history of the Ohio River borderland, Salafia demonstrates how “residents on both sides of the river struggled to accommodate it as at once a dividing line and a unifying economic force. . . . Rather than marking a line that slavery could not penetrate, the Ohio River muddied distinctions, and residents used that ambiguity to try to hold the region together even against the threat of civil war” (p. 1). Ultimately, this analysis yields a new understanding of why Kentucky was a slave state that never seceded from the Union during the Civil War.

Borderland’s focus explains Kentucky’s role as a slave state loyal to the Union. With such strong and long-lasting familial, social, and economic ties established between Kentuckians and their neighbors on the river’s north bank, the idea that Kentucky would ally with the Southern rebellion—even if that rebellion sought to secure slavery...