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.
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