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Stanley Harrold, Kristen Epps. Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 227–228, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.227
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For over a decade interest in slavery and antislavery on the antebellum American South’s boundaries has surged among historians. There have been studies focused on the border slave-labor states, on the free-labor states immediately to their north, and on both. There have been studies of slave escape in this region and, most recently, of southward escapes from Florida and the Old Southwest. Kristen Epps’s Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras is a welcome addition to this literature. Epps’s impressive archival research has uncovered much interesting material regarding this borderland. This and her command of a wide range of secondary studies results in a detailed portrayal of slavery and its legacy in western Missouri and eastern Kansas. But the nature of the material she presents leads her to history’s, as well as slavery’s, periphery.
Rather than focus on clashing free-labor and proslavery ideologies, Epps emphasizes how slavery’s local structure, and black resistance to it, “shaped the region economically, politically, and socially” (2). She seeks to place “enslaved people at the center of this narrative” (2). Influenced by Diane Mutti Burke’s On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households 1815–1865 (2010), Epps stresses that slavery on the Kansas-Missouri border existed on a small scale, as it did in other portions of the Border South. She emphasizes the need for slaves in a small-scale system to develop more than one skill, have close contact with their masters and mistresses, have spouses who lived separately from themselves, and have their time hired out (46). All of these characteristics, Epps argues repeatedly, allowed slaves greater physical mobility than existed for their counterparts in the Lower South where large-scale plantations predominated. This made the slaves on the Kansas-Missouri border more independent, allowed them more access to public places, and gave them more knowledge of regional geography. All of these things made them better able to escape (2–3).
