mants (some thirty-six thousand black soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice) while widows made unlikely war reporters. The description of the harsh conditions of Mexico faced by black troops transferred at the war’s end is silent on the importance of Mexico as a refuge from U.S. slavery to a previous generation of slaves since the 1829 abolition of slavery in that nation. Most important, the authors fail to capture the fundamental divide in values between the government and veterans. The former cared about the cash nexus and preventing fraudulent claims; the latter wanted their just rewards for work, service, and risking their lives.
Despite their limitations, both books provide us with some compelling details concerning the human experience of runaway slaves, wartime service, and postwar survival. Moreover, both works point to the importance of the changing nature of national government in the lives of Americans of African provenance. In the border-states, freedom was precarious, unless one could cross international borders--whether Florida before 1821, Mexico after 1829, or British Canada after 1834. With the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in the United States, the protection of southern slavery gained the support of the national government. More than a decade later during the Civil War, black troops who fought for the Union eventually experienced a degree of equality in pension policy that local and state policies would take generations to emulate.
. One of my in-laws from Missouri once tried to persuade me of the benevolent nature of slavery.
. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Slaves No More: Three Essays in Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 203.. For some of these studies, consult the annual bibliographical supplements published in the journal Slavery and Abolition. For instance, the December 2008 edition contains nearly five pages of secondary writings published on the antebellum South in 2006 and 2007.
. Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, “Fugitive Slaves across North America,” in Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 365-385.
On the other hand, t
. Regosin and Shaffer, Voices of Emancipation, 42, 51, 87.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-civwar.
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie. Review of Frazier, Harriet C., Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Who Helped Them, 1763-1865 and
Regosin, Elizabeth A.; Shaffer, Donald R., eds., Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files.
H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews.
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