Bound Together: Masters and Slaves on the Kansas-Missouri Border, 1825-1865

Abstract

“Bound Together” chronicles the rise and fall of the slave system on the Kansas-Missouri border from the earliest years of American settlement in the 1820s to the end of the Civil War. This work uses nineteen counties along the border—a distinct site of conflict and turmoil over the extension of slavery—as a microcosm of how, in certain key ways, slavery in the American West resembled the established institution associated with the South. Although slavery in the border region did not come in the form of large plantation complexes, the small-scale slaveholding that existed on this line very closely resembled slavery as it had developed in Upper South states such as Tennessee and Kentucky. This small-scale system was one characterized by an active slave hiring market, diverse forms of employment, a prevalence of abroad marriages, and closer contact between slaves and slaveholders. Both slaveowners and non-slaveholding whites from the South effectively transplanted the customs and beliefs that had dominated the slaveholding culture in their home states and imposed them on a smaller institution. Yet, slave agency dictated that the struggle for control over slave mobility and physical spaces manifested itself as an intricate (and sometimes infinitely subtle) process of negotiation, not as a hegemonic institution of white control that left no room for middle ground. Slavery (not merely the political conversation over slavery's expansion) was in fact central to the establishment of these frontier communities, making clear that enslaved African Americans were a significant presence in the narrative of Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. The story of their experiences on the Kansas-Missouri line illustrates how chattel slavery could flourish—albeit briefly—in frontier communities on the periphery of Southern influence.