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Contents Border War Forum Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2014 A Journal of the History and Culture of the Ohio Valley and the Upper South, published in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, by Cincinnati Museum Center and The Filson Historical Society. Contents Border War Forum 3 The Antislavery Wars of Southern Blacks and Enslaved Rebels Shifting the Historiography into the South Douglas R. Egerton 12 Men Are from Missouri, Women Are from Massachusetts Perspectives on Narratives of Violence on the Border between Slavery and Freedom Carol Lasser 20 Transatlantic Dimensions of the Border Wars in the Antebellum United States Edward B. Rugemer 32 Stanley Harrold’s Border War An Appreciation Manisha Sinha 43 Reflections on the Antebellum Border Struggle Stanley Harrold 51 Fugitive Slave Rescues in the North Toward a Geography of Antislavery Violence Robert H. Churchill 76 American Historians and the Challenge of the “New” Global Slavery James Brewer Stewart 87 Collection Essay Civil War Guerrilla Collections at The Filson Historical Society James M. Prichard 94 Collection Essay Remembering Those Who Served The World War I Servicemen Portrait Collection at Cincinnati Museum Center Scott L. Gampfer on the cover: “A Bold Stroke for Freedom”: African Americans fight 100 Announcements off slave catchers, from William Still, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Let- ters, &c…(Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872). COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Contributors Douglas R. Egerton is professor of history at Le Moyne College. He is the author of seven books, including most recently Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2010), and The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s First Progressive Era (Bloomsbury, 2014). Carol Lasser is professor of history and director of the Institute on Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Oberlin College. She has written on women, abolition, and feminisms, and is co-author, with Stacey Robertson, of Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). She is com- pleting, with Gary Kornblith, Elusive Utopia: A History of Race in Oberlin, Ohio. Edward B. Rugemer is associate professor of history and African American stud- ies at Yale University, and author of The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2008). Manisha Sinha is professor of Afro-American studies and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), and The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins of American Democracy (forthcoming Yale University Press, 2015). Stanley Harrold is professor of history at South Carolina State University. He is the author of numerous monographs on the antislavery movement and the Civil War, including Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (University of North Carolina, 2010), which won the Southern Historical Association’s 2011 James A. Rawley award. He is working on a comprehensive history of the relationship between American abolitionism, politics, and government between 1700 and 1870. Robert H. Churchill is associate professor of history at the University of Hartford. He is the author of To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement (University of Michigan Press, 2009). James Brewer Stewart is the founder of Historians Against Slavery and James Wallace Professor of History Emeritus, Macalester College. He has published a dozen books on the history of the American antislavery movement, has appeared in several of the American Experience’s historical documentaries, and is co-editor for Louisiana State University Press of the book series “Abolition, Antislavery, and the Atlantic World.” 2 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY The Antislavery Wars of Southern Blacks and Enslaved Rebels Shifting the Historiography into the South Douglas R. Egerton s late as the early 1980s, scholars of the abolitionist movement tended to focus on two areas of the early republic, and to squabble about which was the more important of the two: the broad Burned Over District thatA stretched from Boston to Buffalo, and the Ohio world of the Lane rebels. At least when it comes to popular culture, regrettably, not a great deal has changed. As 2013’s multi-part PBS series The Abolitionists indicates, militant antislavery evidently sprang to life in 1831 when William Lloyd Garrison began to pub- lish The Liberator. As marvelous and insightful as were on-camera commenta- tors David Blight, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Manisha Sinha, and James Brewer Stewart, they ultimately could not counteract the producers’ vision of the move- ment as largely white, largely northeastern, and one that effectively existed only for the last three decades of the antebellum era. As Richard S. Newman perceptively observed in a critical review of the series, the documen- tary “could have been told several decades ago and in an historiographical universe far away,” as its intense focus on a small band of New England reformers was “not very differ- ent from 1960s depictions of abolitionists.”1 Like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, in which abolitionists were largely absent and black Americans existed to observe passively con- gressional debates from the balcony, the PBS series hinted that African Americans gener- ally served the antislavery movement by sing- ing at white weddings. Richard Allen, David Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Ruggles, and David Walker failed to earn Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: even brief cameos. University of North Carolina Press, 2010). SUMMER 2014 3 THE ANTISLAVERY WARS OF SOUTHERN BLACKS AND ENSLAVED REBELS The scholarly world, as specialists in the field well know, has largely moved on, and it had begun to do so well before I waded into this historiography in graduate school. As early as 1961 and 1966, Merton L. Dillon’s biographies of Elijah P. Lovejoy and Benjamin Lundy examined the saga of antislavery reform in the Lower North and Upper South, as did Stewart’s 1973 article, “Evangelicalism and the Radical Strain in Southern Antislavery Thought.” More recently, his- torians like Newman, Graham Russell Hodges, and Gary Nash—writers more interested in black activism than in white evangelical reform movements—have turned their attention to New York and Philadelphia, just as they have shoved the story back into the years following the American Revolution. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Carol Lasser, and Stacey Robertson have wonderfully chronicled the great grass- roots army of women who fought and organized to end slavery.2 Stanley Harrold’s prodigious, influential, and revisionist body of work draws the story farther south yet, into Washington City and the contested border- lands stretching from Maryland in the East to Kansas in the West. From 1986’s Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union through The Abolitionists and the South, the co-edited anthology Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, 2001’s American Abolitionists, followed by Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, and then The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves, and most especially, the award-winning Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, perhaps no single historian has done as much to upset the old narrative, confound the old debate, and re-conceptualize the antislavery movement. Such paradigm shifts, of course, do not come without detractors, so allow me to illuminate Harrold’s greatest achievements and suggest what remains to be done.3 To an extent, Border War is not the first study to portray the Lower North and Upper South as a region long caught up in cross-border conflict, and of course even the most innovative scholarship rests on the shoulders of histo- rians who came before. William W. Freehling, as Harrold observes, not only has thoroughly studied the Border South in the years leading up to secession and war, he essentially pioneered the concept of a multi-sectional South. Yet Freehling emphasizes moderates in the region and underlines peaceful resolu- tion of sectional issues, whereas Harrold highlights “violent and often exter- nal threat[s] to a viable slave system.” Over the course of Harrold’s interlock- ing books, endless battles over abolitionist plots, such as the 1848 attempt to smuggle slaves out of the nation’s capital aboard the Pearl, legal and extra- legal efforts to assist runaway slaves, and openly violent assaults on the sys- tem forced petty masters along the border into the arms of Lower South ideologues. In this telling, clashes over runaways replaces territorial expan- sion as the fundamental North versus South conflict along the borderlands. (Because Harrold focuses on the Upper South, however, he carefully argues 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY DOUGLAS R. EGERTON that territorial acquisition remained the key motive among Lower South fire-eaters and expansionists.) Seen in this way, bleeding Kansas becomes not so much a new and sudden explosion of violence over the movement of slavery into America’s heartland, but rather “an esca- lation of an existing border conflict.”4 This returns us to that historiographical perennial: just how important were the abolitionists? Interestingly, a panel at the first meeting I attended of the Society for Historians of
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