Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River, 1787-1851

This dissertation examines how antebellum Americans understood the Ohio River as the geographical division between slavery and freedom. Why and how did Americans make the Ohio River the division between slavery and freedom? How did they accommodate this river that drew its life from northern and southern sources and divided two worlds? As the Civil War split the country, why did this borderland fail to break apart at the seam of freedom and slavery?

The Ohio River was both a boundary and an artery of movement that united the region. The river encouraged the peopling of its valleys: each succession of settlers, Ohio Indians, French traders, and English colonists met at its banks, creating a border. When Americans seized this international borderland, they made the Ohio River the legislated boundary between slavery and freedom, but the movement generated by the river created ties that crossed the divide. By 1816 Americans established a border that separated slave states from free states, and a river that divided bound labor between slavery on the southern bank and servitude on the northern one.

The Ohio River split the North from the South on a map, but at this periphery of slavery and freedom, these fundamental nineteenth century dichotomies behaved more like rivers than static ideals. The river linked borderland slavery with borderland free labor, as wage labor and chattel slavery became points on a capitalist continuum rather than mutually exclusive categories for black Americans. Enslaved and free African Americans found no refuge north of the river, and, south of the river, the slave trade expedited the flow of blacks to the Deep South. White Americans on both sides of the river found common cause by embracing the Ohio River's role in the movement of blacks out of the borderland. These conservative antislavery whites claimed the river gave the region social and economic coherence that outweighed the border. By the 1850s, politicians and residents defined the region as a borderland, denouncing threats of disunion offered by pro and antislavery radicals. Even the Civil War failed to split this borderland as the nation broke in two.