Content area
Full Text
On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865. By Diane Mutti Burke. Early American Places. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c 2010. Pp. [xviii], 413. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3683-1; cloth, $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3636-7.)
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips wrote in 1918 that yeoman farmers in the slaveowning South "were far more numerous and substantial than has been commonly realized" (American Negro Slavery [New York, 1918], 398). Diane Mutti Burke argues in On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 that, after a century of scholarly attention to plantation slavery and the lower South, there is a still "a paucity of historical research on small slaveholdings and border state slavery," two aspects of the slave South where yeoman slave owners predominated (p. 3). Mutti Burke helps redress this dual shortfall with a well-written study of small rural slaveholdings in Missouri.
Although only 10 percent of Missouri's population was enslaved in 1860, Mutti Burke argues that "slavery was central to the economy and society of antebellum Missouri nonetheless" (p. 49). Missouri's...