s, 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 man’s inhumanity to man that stretches back into the courtyard of Missouri’s State Penitentiary. An outsider reading this local history must not only doubt the basic humanity of those who held slaves but also find shocking “the community’s intense anger toward anyone accused of slave stealing” (p. 140).
This book, however, has its weaknesses. Legal records reveal human stories, but they also reduce the historical record to surviving documentation that invariably reflects the majesty of the law and the insignificance of its subjects. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that Missouri was the runaway capital. The passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was in response to frequent runaways from Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky--all bordering slave as well as free states. Finally, the failure of this book to situate itself within the broader historical literature on topics like the myth of the happy slave, slave runaways advertisements, and international border disputes over slavery gives this book a provincial and almost dated feel to it. This is a pity because it mounts a persuasive brief for slavery in Missouri as being guilty as charged.
According to one reliable source, some 8,344 black soldiers served in the Union army from Missouri. Peter Grumer, a former slave who had been manumitted, served in the 67th United States Colored Infantry (USCI). Slave-born Milton Denny enlisted in the 65th USCI at Benton barracks, St. Louis, Missouri, in January 1864. James Henry served in the 60th USCI (Regosin and Shaffer, pp. 42, 51, 87) The sources for these black enlistees are the U.S. Pension Bureau Files organized under Record Group 15 in the National Archives. In 1862, the U.S. Congress assigned the U.S. Pension Bureau to administer pensions to soldiers and sailors disabled by their wartime service. In 1890, Congress broadened its pension mandate to cover any disabilities acquired by former service personnel. It is the experiences of ex-slave soldiers as revealed through these pension files that is the central focus of Eliz