On Slavery's Border

Missouri's Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865

Diane Mutti Burke

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780820337364
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On Slavery's Border is a bottom-up examination of how slavery and slaveholding were influenced by both the geography and the scale of the slaveholding enterprise. Missouri's strategic access to important waterways made it a key site at the periphery of the Atlantic world. By the time of statehood in 1821, people were moving there in large numbers, especially from the upper South, hoping to replicate the slave society they'd left behind.

Diane Mutti Burke focuses on the Missouri counties located along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to investigate small-scale slavery at the level of the household and neighborhood. She examines such topics as small slaveholders' child-rearing and fiscal strategies, the economics of slavery, relations between slaves and owners, the challenges faced by slave families, sociability among enslaved and free Missourians within rural neighborhoods, and the disintegration of slavery during the Civil War. Mutti Burke argues that economic and social factors gave Missouri slavery an especially intimate quality. Owners directly oversaw their slaves and lived in close proximity with them, sometimes in the same building. White Missourians believed this made for a milder version of bondage. Some slaves, who expressed fear of being sold further south, seemed to agree.

Mutti Burke reveals, however, that while small slaveholding created some advantages for slaves, it also made them more vulnerable to abuse and interference in their personal lives. In a region with easy access to the free states, the perception that slavery was threatened spawned white anxiety, which frequently led to violent reassertions of supremacy.

ON SLAVERY’S BORDER

Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865

DIANE MUTTI BURKE

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 “They came like an Avalanche”: The Development of a Small-Slaveholding Promised Land

2 Households in the Middle Ground: Small Slaveholders’ Family Strategies

3 “I was at home with the Negroes at work”: Labor within Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households

4 “May we as one family live in peace and harmony”: Small-Slaveholding Household Relations

5 “Mah pappy belong to a neighbor”: Marriage and Family among Missouri Slaves

6 “We all lived neighbors”: Sociability in Small-Slaveholding Neighborhoods

7 The War Within: The Passing of Border Slavery

Tables

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Growing up in Kansas City, I understood that Missouri was a border state during the Civil War, and I also had a vague notion that the region was not a land of large plantations; however, I was never taught the history of slavery in the state. When choosing a topic for an undergraduate honors thesis, I decided to explore the experiences of the slaves and slaveholders who lived in my natal state. Without fully understanding it at the time, I stumbled into a historiographically significant project. I have been researching and writing on this topic ever since, and along the way I have benefited from the assistance and guidance of many wonderful individuals. I hope to thank them all, but I know that with a project spanning so many years I may inadvertently omit someone who helped me.

I have profited from wonderful advice and support from a number of professors and faculty mentors at both Dartmouth College and Emory University. Jere Daniell, Michael Green, and Margaret Darrow inspired me to learn and think about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States and European history, and Mary Kelley and Sydney Nathans skillfully mentored me as I wrote my undergraduate thesis. At Emory University, I benefited from sitting in the classrooms of Jonathan Prude, Margot Finn, and Susan Socolow, as well as Mary Odem, who both taught me well and served as a model for balancing teaching, scholarship, and motherhood. Dan Carter was of great assistance in the initial phase of the process, and Eugene Genovese graciously stepped in when Dr. Carter moved to another university, lending his incredible breadth of knowledge on southern slavery and society to this project. Throughout the years, James Roark has been a constant source of advice and support. He carefully read drafts of chapters and articles and has been enthusiastic about the need for a new study of Missouri slavery since we first talked of it. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, for her unfailing encouragement over the years. She was supportive of my decisions and she helped improve my project and encouraged me both personally and professionally in so many ways. I only wish that she could be here to witness the publication of this book.

I often learned nearly as much from my outstanding peers as I did from my professors. I benefited from lively historical debates with Dan Costello, Sarah Gardner, David Freeman, and Jeffrey Young, around both the seminar and the cafeteria table. The members of my writing group, Christine Jacobson Carter, Ellen Rafshoon, Yael Fletcher, Annette Parks, Ruth Dickens, Naomi Nelson, Stacey Horstmann Gatti, Jaclyn Stanke, and Belle Tuten, offered helpful criticisms of early drafts of chapters. Traveling with Jacki Stanke and Sarah Gardner made research road trips much more enjoyable. Steve Goodson and Ann Short Chirhart, who were further along in the process, always were sources of advice and encouragement. Good friends, Christine Carter, Ellen Rafshoon, Ruth Dickens, and Laura Crawley, shared with me the joys and frustrations of balancing graduate school and motherhood.

I deeply appreciate the History Department at the University of Missouri–Kansas City for giving me the opportunity to live and work in my hometown. My wonderful colleagues and students have made UMKC a wonderful place to teach, as well as research and write. I first must thank my department chairs Louis Potts and Gary Ebersole, who have been extremely supportive of my work over the past six years. In addition, Dean Karen Vorst granted me a leave from teaching during a crucial juncture in the revision process. Gail Green and Amy Brost provided amazing administrative support. Scott Walters patiently endured making multiple revisions to his maps, and graduate students Jennifer Farr, Clinton Lawson, and Chainy Folsom spent hours transcribing microfilm, tracking down documents and photographs, and double-checking my statistics and citations. My colleagues Pellom McDaniels, Louis Potts, and Linna Funk Place have served as excellent sounding boards for my ideas about nineteenth-century Missouri history. Lynda Payne, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Andrew Bergerson, Carla Klausner, Dennis Merrill, and Linda Mitchell have provided me with sound scholarly and professional advice, and James Falls, Mary Ann Wynkoop, Dave Freeman, Viviana Grieco, Shona Kelly Wray, and especially John Herron have made life in Cockefair Hall a lot more enjoyable.

Funding from a number of universities and foundations made the research and writing of this book possible. The McGuire Grant for African American Studies at Dartmouth College funded early research trips to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Columbia, Missouri. While at Emory, I received generous graduate fellowships and numerous travel grants from both the History and the Women’s Studies Departments, as well as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Southern Studies Dissertation Fellowship which provided me with a fifth year of funding. The Beveridge Grant from the American Historical Association and the Mississippi Delta Initiative Grant from the National Park Service funded additional research trips, and a grant from the Earhart Foundation allowed me to finish the manuscript. In the course of working on book revisions I received a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Missouri–Kansas City, a Supreme Court of Missouri Historical Society Robert Eldridge Seiler Fellowship from the Missouri State Archives, and the Richard S. Brownlee Fund Grant from the State Historical Society of Missouri. I am especially grateful to the University of Missouri Research Board for funding a year-long leave from teaching that allowed me to accept a postdoctoral fellowship at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. The time spent in New Haven away from professional and personal obligations was restorative, productive, and invaluable to the writing process.

I have been fortunate to work in wonderful archives while researching this book. The staffs at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Missouri State Archives, and the Missouri History Museum, particularly Jeff Meyer, were extremely helpful. The interlibrary loan librarians at Emory University and the University of Missouri–Kansas City, especially David Bauer, as well as Tammy Green from the University of Missouri–Columbia, went above and beyond to assist me. I have received tremendous support and assistance from the staff at the State Historical Society of Missouri and would like to specifically thank Gary Kremer, Lynn Gentzler, Christine Montgomery, and Loucile Malone. John Rodrigue first invited me to visit the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland during graduate school, and it was then that I came to understand the importance of the work done there. Leslie Rowland graciously opened up the project’s well-organized photocopy archive to me and patiently assisted me in my attempts to understand the Civil War military records related to emancipation in Missouri. I could not have written this book without the tremendous archival resources found at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Columbia. During the early years of working on this project, Randy Roberts, Cindy Stewart, and Diane Ayotte were an incredible source of knowledge of Missouri’s archival resources, and the current archivists has been just as attentive to my research needs. I especially enjoyed the long stretches of time that I spent at the Kansas City branch of WHMC. Marilyn Burlingame, Bettie Swiontek, Jennifer Parker, and David Boutros were part of this project from the beginning, and more recently Peter Foley has helped during the final stages of manuscript preparation. They advised me, spent countless hours photocopying for me, and provided me with enjoyable breaks from reading documents.

I sincerely appreciate the remarkable generosity shown to me by family and friends while on research trips. Becky Eustance Kohn invited me to stay with her in Baltimore while working at the National Archives, and Nancy Staab hosted me in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. My brothers, Jim and John Mutti, and their college roommates, as well as my then future sister-in-law, Megan Poole Mutti, allowed me to stay with them for weeks on end while working in Columbia, Missouri. The long dinners and good conversations enjoyed with friends and family after the archives closed made the trips both personally and professionally satisfying.

My professional debts are numerous, and I only hope that I will not forget any of the many exceptional scholars who have helped me along the way. Dennis Boman graciously shared his massive and detailed database of the Abiel Leonard Papers, enabling me to quickly identify only those documents related to the Leonard family and slaves in an otherwise overwhelmingly large collection. I have benefited tremendously from the outstanding comments made about my work by panelists and audience members at numerous conferences throughout the years, including Edward Baptist, Beverly Bond, Stephanie Camp, Barbara Fields, Louis Gerteis, Michael Johnson, Wilma King, Barbara Krauthamer, Allan Kulikoff, Virginia Laas, James Oa...

Table of contents

• ON SLAVERY’S BORDER