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Gregory Downs, Slave Stampedes on the Missouri Borderlands, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 397–399, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae173
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In narratives about runaway enslaved people and their effect on the coming of the Civil War, writers and teachers often emphasize notable individual figures such as Anthony Burns or Joshua Glover. The creators of Slave Stampedes on the Missouri Borderlands aim to center group “stampedes” by capturing the breadth and sweep of mass escapes. They also, necessarily, track the expansion of the use of the concept of “stampede” to refer to groups of escaping enslaved people. They trace shifts in the term's usage from a Spanish word for western animal runs to the flight of groups of enslaved people during the late 1840s and 1850s. From scattered references in the mid-1840s, the Web site organizers find more than fifty uses in 1848, followed by increased coverage of the 1849 Canton stampede, then in debate about stampedes on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1850.
Slave Stampedes on the Missouri Borderlands focuses on Missouri, the site of intense conflict over the future of slavery and of a number of well-known stampedes, including the 1849 Canton stampede, a large 1854 St. Louis stampede, and a John Brown–assisted flight from western Missouri in December 1858. That stampede influenced reporting that Brown's 1859 attack on Harpers Ferry was an effort to spark a stampede more than a revolution. In turn, stampede discourse framed the portrayal of the large-scale movement of freedpeople toward U.S. lines in 1861, before the word was displaced by discussion of “contrabands.”
