ebooks Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South by From Brand: University of Georgia Press in History

Description

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.