including at least two foreign governments.” Although runaways, abolitionists, and international relations are pursued throughout the book’s ten chapters, these central topics are examined in three distinct and important chapters.
Slaves who absconded from their owners are treated in chapter 5, “Runaways.” It analyzes more than one hundred Missouri newspaper advertisements and stories involving at least two hundred runaways between 1808 and 1860. These runaways--or what I prefer to call self-emancipators--were mainly men aged between eighteen and fifty who left on their own during the pleasant weather months. One such man was Anthony who escaped in early October 1807 wearing a blue coat and pantaloons, and bearing an R brand on his cheek. There were some women escapees: Catherine ran away with her two children while pregnant with a third child. Frazier draws several conclusions about slave flight. State laws failed to prevent runaways as demonstrated by their constant rewriting of legislation from the first slave laws passed in 1804 through the 1850s. (This was also true for anti-runaway legislation in seventeenth-century Virginia.) The prevalence of runaways overturns the myth of contented slaves. In Missouri, “slaves had the opportunity to vote with their feet, and thousands left their owners” (p. 19). This opportunity was primarily geographic: the state’s four free borders made it “the runaway capital of American slavery” (p. 167).
Those who helped slave runaways are the focus of chapter 7, “Abolitionist Prison Inmates.” It examines the Register of Inmates at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City between 1837 and 1865. The forty-two convicts found guilty of grand larceny of slave theft are listed in the book’s third appendix by name, age, birthplace, place of conviction, date of prison entry, length of sentence, and type of discharge. Virginia-born John Whitman served his full sentence of two years from May 1846 to May 1848. African American Eliza Sly, also from Virginia, was sentenced to five years, but was pardoned after eight months. New Hampshire-born William Knapp was less fortunate: sentenced to six years, he died in prison. According to the author, these convictions point to a large “chasm” between prisoners and the “average” state citizen (p. 126). Another major conclusion is that the incompatibility between the large number of runaways and the relatively small number of convicted “slave thieves” refutes the myth of the outside instigator coming in and disturbing the slaves’ tranquility.
Antebellum Missouri--whether in textbooks or in the popular imagination--is usually situated within the continental United States. Frazier offers an important international dimension. Fugitive slaves sought refuge in Spanish Florida until that state’s annexation to the United States in 1821. Fugitive slaves began to arrive in Mexico after that nation’s abolition of slavery in 1829. The “runaway’s imagined destinations” can be traced through various diplomatic maneuvers between the United States and foreign nations (p. 106). The most famous of these in Missouri concerned John Anderson, the subject of chapter 6, “Slave John Anderson and Canadian-English Justice.” Slave-born Anderson (nee Jack Burton) stabbed Missouri slaveholder Seneca T. P. Digges before fleeing six hundred miles northward crossing the Canadian border. He relocated to England and emigrated to Liberia in West Africa, after which he disappeared. Frazier’s main point is not only to establish the critical importance of an international border of freedom alongside a national border of slavery, but also to insist that justice for the freedom-seeker was frequently unavailable in Missouri.
The author is to be commended for writing a well-documented, readable, and interesting historical account of slave laws and their resistors that should both inform more familiar narratives of antebellum border-states’ politics as well as correct some of the myths still resonant in the local imagination. Indeed, Frazier belongs to a broader radical tradition of protesting 