Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras by Kristen Epps (review)

By situating Kansas in the shifting frontier borderlands and foregrounding African Americans, whose labor and mobility shaped the region, Kristen Epps seeks to recalibrate our understanding of Bleeding Kansas. Doing so makes the 193 enslaved people reported in Kansas's 1855 territorial census resonate differently when they are considered as part of the larger borderland. In 1850 16 percent of the population, over ten thousand individuals, in the Missouri counties bordering Kansas were enslaved. The people who lived there, the nature of their work, their interactions in a constantly evolving region, and how the well-known story of Bleeding Kansas can be understood as a function of "this border's instability and ambiguity" are Epps's central concerns (p. 4).

Epps's first chapter investigates southern settlement from 1820 to 1840, focusing on this region's contours and antecedents, the mingling of different cultures, and how slavery undergirded these relationships. Epps places Kansas within a tradition of small-scale slavery similar to that of the upper South and thus builds on Diane Mutti Burke's On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865 (Athens, Ga., 2010). By the time Congress created the Kansas Territory in 1854, it was "functionally a slave territory," where slaveholders'"cultural authority" was "challenged not only by the free-soil political agenda but also by the actions of the slaves themselves" (pp. 99, 100). By 1857 "the fates of Kansas and Missouri began to diverge" (p. 115). "Slaves' knowledge of the social geography and access to the physical landscape were central to this unraveling," one that left Kansas with just two slaves listed in the 1860 census (p. 117). Finally, Epps considers emancipation and the opportunities and risks that war brought to the region's African American population. This Kansas-Missouri border between two Union states, one slave and one free, was atypical, Epps argues, because "[s]laves' increased mobility under small-scale slaveholding had played a central role in resistance prior to the Civil War, and during the conflict the mass migration of freedpeople saw that resistance come to fruition" (p. 185).

One of the main reasons slavery in this region has received, as Epps notes, "little attention from scholars" is the paucity of sources (p. 2). Epps has proved remarkably adept in acquiring and using her varied sources, but they remain limited. As such, it can be difficult to truly capture the interior lives of those on the margins, whether enslaved or free, leading to many suppositions about their beliefs. In part, Epps's own effort to approach her sources with "a cautious, critical eye" leads to repeated, awkward acknowledgments—for instance, that our knowledge is gleaned from accounts "filtered through a white lens" and that the African American soldiers' perspective "is only partially discernable within white officers' writings" (pp. 7, 74, 182). Yet to allow these challenges to dictate the histories that are written is to continue to misunderstand our own history in its full complexity. As Epps concludes in her epilogue, "Bondspeople in this region were not an artificially constructed symbol, a tool of propaganda, created to rally antislavery proponents to the cause. They were real people, with real stories" (p. 195).

Although Gunja SenGupta notably considers the status of slavery and the enslaved in territorial Kansas in For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854–1860 (Athens, Ga., 1996), Epps's work—by expanding across both space and time—helps us see this history differently. By incorporating lenses not usually used on Kansas, Epps comes to intriguing conclusions, making a case for a "shared history," one emphasizing the transition "from a liminal, hybrid space where Southern culture and unfree labor slowly consumed other influences, to a boundary between...