During the 1840s and 1850s, a dangerous ferment afflicted the
North-South border region, pitting the slave states of Maryland,
Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri against the free states of New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Aspects of this struggle--the
underground railroad, enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, mob
actions, and sectional politics--are well known as parts of other
stories. Here, Stanley Harrold explores the border struggle itself, the
dramatic incidents that it comprised, and its role in the complex
dynamics leading to the Civil War. Border War examines the previously
neglected cross-border clash of attitudes and traditions dating many
generations back. By the mid-nineteenth century, nowhere else were
tensions greater between antislavery and proslavery interests. Nowhere
else was there more direct conflict between the forces binding North and
South together and those driving them apart. There were mass slave
escapes, battles between antislavery and proslavery vigilantes, and
fierce resistance in the Border North to the kidnapping of free African
Americans. There were also fights throughout the borderlands between
fugitive slaves and those attempting to apprehend them. Harrold argues
that, during the 1850s, warfare on the Kansas-Missouri line and John
Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, were manifestations of a more
pervasive border conflict that helped push the Lower South into
secession and helped persuade most of the Border South to stand by the
Union.
