Harriet C. Frazier. Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Who Helped Them, 1763-1865. Jefferson: Mcfarland, 2009. 224 pp. $45.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7864-4678-0.
Elizabeth A. Regosin, Donald R. Shaffer, eds. Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files. New York: New York University Press, 2008. xi + 217 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-7586-8; $23.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8147-7587-5.
Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (Howard University)
Published on H-CivWar (June, 2011)
Commissioned by Martin P. Johnson (Miami University Hamilton)
Runaways and Veterans
Most historians of antebellum slavery agree that fugitive slaves were central rather than incidental to the region’s landscape. Most scholars also agree that black troops helped to preserve the Union and end U.S. slavery. What is often missing from these generalities, however, is the detailed human story. Both these books help provide this missing element as well as broader commentary on relations between slave laws and national governments. Readers of this review will probably have history books on their shelves with references to the 1820 Missouri Compromise, the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, Dred and Harriet Scott, and John Brown. These prominent events and personalities shaped antebellum Missouri. Contemporary Missourians are raised on tales about the limited importance of slavery in the state, the benevolent nature of border-state slavery compared to slavery in the Deep South, and the prominent role of abolitionists in challenging the institution and helping slaves to escape to freedom.
Harriet C. Frazier, a retired law professor who has written local histories on lynching, capital punishment, and slavery in her native state, provides an alternative approach to both antebellum political history as well as popular beliefs. Her subject is delineated on page 1: “This book tells the story of how those who could shook off their slavish yokes and of the help they received from others, 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 year