Slavery on the Periphery

The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras

Kristen Epps

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780820350516
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Slavery on the Periphery focuses on nineteen counties on the Kansas-Missouri border, tracing slavery's rise and fall from the earliest years of American settlement through the Civil War along this critical geographical, political, and social fault line. Kristen Epps explores slavery's emergence from an upper South slaveholding culture and its development into a small-scale system characterized by slaves' diverse forms of employment, close contact between slaves and slaveholders, a robust hiring market, and the prevalence of abroad marriages. She demonstrates that space and place mattered to enslaved men and women most clearly because slave mobility provided a means of resistance to the strictures of daily life. Mobility was a medium for both negotiation and confrontation between slaves and slaveholders, and the ongoing political conflict between proslavery supporters and antislavery proponents opened new doors for such resistance. Slavery's expansion on the Kansas-Missouri border was no mere intellectual debate within the halls of Congress. Its horrors had become a visible presence in a region so torn by bloody conflict that it captivated the nineteenth-century American public.

Foregrounding African Americans' place in the border narrative illustrates how slavery's presence set the stage for the Civil War and emancipation here, as it did elsewhere in the United States.

1 / Westward Ho! Southern Settlement on the Frontier, 1820–1840

In the fall of 1827, George Sibley, factor at Fort Osage on the Missouri River and an authority on the West, penned a letter to his acquaintance Archibald Dorsey. From his “cottage” in what is now the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri, Sibley touted the great advantages of life there, detailing, among other things, the price of land in newly opened Jackson County and the pleasant prospects for a healthy hemp and tobacco crop. He noted with some foresight that “Tobacco and Hemp will no doubt be our Staple commodities.” To produce such crops, slave labor would be readily available. “The usual prices for common labourers by the month, white or black, is $13 a month, or 50 cents a day,” he wrote. “The best slaves hire for about $120 a year—common ones for about $80. Slaves who are mechanics, or carpenters, smiths, masons hire for about $20 a month but are not much in demand—at present slaves are high in prices—first rate men are worth from 400 to 500 dollars, Lads 3 to 400—Women and Girls from 2 to 300 dollars.” There were, by his estimation, “strong inducements for people to settle in it from the old States, especially such as have large families and are not wealthy.”¹ Sibley had a distinct vision for this region, situated at the confluence of white, native, and black cultures: he foresaw the establishment of a yeomanry whose few slaves would “provide substantial comforts, make domestic improvements & render life easy, comfortable, and happy.”² Although Sibley’s own experience as an explorer, government factor, and surveyor made him exemplary, the Sibley household’s attitude toward slavery fit just such a model, with Sibley owning at least two slaves by 1813, including one woman who likely worked in the home and a man named George who was Sibley’s cook and manservant. This household was one of many to settle in western Missouri, establishing small-scale slavery in the region and shaping the social and political identity of this American crossroads.³

Slaveholders’ westward emigration, like that of their nonslaveholding Southern and Northern counterparts, was motivated in large part by their desire for greater economic opportunities and upward mobility, two concepts that went hand in hand with the availability of cheap, fertile land out west. Slaveholders in the early nineteenth century looked toward land that held the promise of a bountiful harvest, booming business, or other professional and personal accomplishment. Kinship ties also loomed large for enterprising Southerners, as mobility was no barrier to continued community. Chain migration, as David Hackett Fischer and James Kelly observed in their study of Virginia, “was common in this great hegira.”⁴ Families and friends used those relationships to determine where to emigrate, and often this meant settling near those of comparable social standing and with similar worldviews. In what is now eastern Kansas and western Missouri, these newcomers generally hailed from Upper South states like Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland. With such demographic dominance, as Diane Mutti Burke has concluded, these Southerners “ultimately had the greatest influence on the development of the new land.”⁵ Contemporaries noted such emigration with enthusiasm. John Mason Peck, a Baptist minister who traveled throughout the Missouri River valley, remarked that “it seemed as though Kentucky and Tennessee were breaking up and moving to the ‘Far West.’”⁶ Slaveholding emigrants and the enslaved members of their households dramatically reshaped the West’s political and social landscape, building a foundation of slaveholding the impact of which would remain for decades.

While many of the aforementioned impulses also applied to Northern emigrants, unlike Northerners, white Southern emigrants insisted in word and deed that the future of slavery lay in the West. As historian James Oakes observed, this was the binding that brought white Southerners of disparate classes together, since “what united small slaveholders with the sons of planters was the goal of purchasing land and slaves and moving west in pursuit of that goal.”⁷ Moreover, what united nonslaveholding Southerners with their slaveholding neighbors—despite some deep-seated class antagonisms—was a common cultural insistence on slavery’s necessity not only for economic reasons but also to maintain the South’s strict racial order. The West’s potential as a “safety valve” for slavery—an outlet for maintaining the Southern way of life and thus promoting its superiority—made it powerfully attractive to white Southerners of all stations. While most historians conceive of this expansion in terms of the cotton revolution and plantation culture in the Deep South, these impulses also saw fulfillment in the Upper South. Most slaveholders did not give a second (or even first) thought to whether or not they would import slave labor, since in their minds black and white were inextricably linked, and human property was essential to the success of their new ventures. Simply put, this “gigantic growth machine” of slavery could no longer be contained in the East.⁸ Expansion, then, would have profound individual benefits for a slaveholding household, as well as systemic implications for the peculiar institution writ large.

This emigration of Southern slaveholding culture also reflects the mobility within the enslaved population. Enslaved emigrants found themselves participating in a westward movement designed to ensure their continued enslavement on a structural level as well as a personal one. The men, women, and children who relocated during the Second Middle Passage, as Ira Berlin terms it, would have profoundly different experiences than those they left behind.⁹ While their desires, thoughts, and fears have been lost to us, there can be no doubt that they had apprehensions about their new lives. For those who traveled forcibly at the hands of slave traders, the trauma they experienced in slave pens and en route further colored those same worries. As Berlin notes, kinship bonds often suffered in this forced migration, as did slaves’ sense of identity, whether this relocation came through sale or traveling alongside white owners heading westward.¹⁰ Bondspeople carried their own cultural mores and expectations, hoping to re-create some semblance of order and stability in their new homes, even as forces outside their control delineated their movements.

These involuntary migrants to the border region found themselves in distant communities on the outskirts of American settlement, far removed from major spheres of influence, but guided nonetheless by the cultural expectations and value systems that slaveholders transplanted out West. Slaves worked alongside whites to build homes, improve the land, cultivate gardens, and construct outbuildings with few resources and much labor, all while navigating the racial borders of these communities and scouting out opportunities for resistance. African Americans shaped the region’s social geography, though they lacked the ability to fundamentally influence local government and legal institutions. If the story of the West considers whites’ mobility, that should be no less true for the enslaved. Chattel slavery was becoming both a Western and a Southern phenomenon.

Enslaved people living on the border prior to Missouri statehood also encountered a syncretic world exhibiting a remarkable degree of demographic diversity, a world in which their struggles to adapt were accompanied by a relative ease of mobility. In the early 1800s, the Kansas-Missouri line did not yet exist on any European or American map, but the region enjoyed a convergence of waterways that made it a crossroads of native, European, and American cultures. As historian William Foley has noted, “not clearly situated in any of the four national geographic sections, and yet a part of all, Missouri and its people personify American pluralism.”¹¹ However, western Missouri and northern Indian Territory (which would become Kansas Territory in 1854) was a zone of transition in the 1820s and 1830s, where longtime denizens witnessed the demise of French cultural authority, a crumbling fur trade on the Missouri River, the exclusion of indigenous tribes like the Osage, the challenges of statehood and slavery’s expansion, the repercussions of the Indian Removal Act, and increased American emigration, all over the course of mere decades.

Meanwhile, the border region was becoming an extension of the small-scale slaveholding culture that existed elsewhere in the Upper South. As Diane Mutti Burke has observed, Missouri had the highest number of small-scale slaveholdings anywhere in the United States, aside from Delaware.¹² Small-scale enterprises held several advantages for slaveholders. Owning a few slaves was a relatively small investment that could garner impressive returns without requiring significant capital. Additionally, it allowed owners to address diverse and fluctuating labor needs promptly by simplifying the process of allocating labor; slaves often acquired diverse skill sets, which was not always the case on large plantations that relied on specialized tasks. Slaves in a small-scale system might find themselves working in agricultural, business, or domestic spaces all within a short timeframe. Small-scale slaveholding also required less infrastructure. Overseers, detailed schedules, and complicated management techniques were uncommon, due to a smaller labor force, which meant slaveholders could invest more time in other pursuits. Or, in very small households, owners might then be free to work alongside their slaves and thus commit their own labor to their business or agricultural enterprises. Some of these elements might also be possible on large plantations, but small-scale slaveholding granted a flexibility that was enticing to many whites in the Upper South.

Many founding fathers of western Missouri counties, and the leading governmental, cultural, and religious figures in neighboring Indian Territory, were small slaveholders who enjoyed significant cultural and political capital. This was a trend borne out across the South as slaveowners’ formidable political and social connections gave them unprecedented authority.¹³ Here slaveholders occupied an elite status (though not the only elite status) because their ability to own and care for slaves illustrated wealth in a society where deprivation was the norm for many migrants scraping by as they established farms and businesses. There were also nonslaveholding emigrants from Northern states, but the region’s character came thanks to Southerners (whether slaveholding or nonslaveholding) who supported slavery. This was, to borrow the words of Ira Berlin, a “society of slaves” on its way to becoming a “slave society,” at least if the hopes and prayers of slaveholders—and the deepest fear of slaves—were to come true.¹⁴ Though Western and Southern (and to some extent Northern) society was being refigured and reconstituted on this border, many of the same markers of elite status continued to dominate the social landscape.

African Americans’ enslavement in the region began only after scattered European and American settlements spread along the Missouri River, since tribes indigenous to eastern Kansas and western Missouri—the Osage, Kansa, Wichita, and Pawnee—did not embrace African slavery. It first took root in the 1810s and 1820s, at roughly the same time as Missouri’s statehood, but slavery’s existence elsewhere in Missouri predated American settlement in the region, extending back to French Louisiana. French miners digging for silver and lead in southeastern Missouri first used black slaves as early as 1719 or 1720. The scarcity of labor in this region made some French settlers contemplate using native slaves, but by the 1750s, French settlements along the Mississippi River were generally committed to African slavery.¹⁵ To regulate this growing labor force, the French government instituted the “Black Code,” or Code Noir, in 1724. This codified France’s philosophical and legal conception of chattel slavery. Like the model found in the British West Indies and the Old South, the French model aimed to restrict black mobility and enforce white authority through violence, but it included key provisions recognizing that “although slaves were property, they were also human beings with souls to be saved.”¹⁶ It differed from American slave labor practices by condemning rape and the selling of small children apart from their parents, forbidding labor on Sundays and holidays, and condemning the torture or murder of a slave by their owner. Slaves must also be baptized into the Catholic faith. There were serious punishments in place, however, for slaves who assaulted or stole from their master or mistress. Like other slave codes, the Code Noir may have been the legitimate authority on such matters, but in day-to-day life, slaveholders likely developed their own idiosyncratic practices and implemented the Code Noir as they saw fit.¹⁷

Likewise, the Spanish, who gained nominal control of the region in 1763, continued to use slave labor, although the Spanish slave code differed in some respects from the Code Noir. For instance, slaves subject to Spanish law could testify before the court in certain civil cases, own property, and purchase their freedom. The most significant event during Spanish rule, regarding slavery, occurred on December 6, 1769, when the territorial governor abolished Indian slavery once and for all. By the 1772 census, almost 38 percent of non-Indian residen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Westward Ho! Southern Settlement on the Frontier, 1820–1840
• 2 Becoming Little Dixie: The Creation of a Western Slave Society, 1840–1854
• 3 Contested Ground: The Enslaved Experience during Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1857
• 4 The Tide Turns: The Demise of Slavery on the Border, 1857–1861
• 5 Entering the Promised Land: The Black Experience in the Civil War Years, 1861–1865
• Epilogue
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index