Journal of the Southwest

The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery ExtensionControversy by Eugene BerwangerReview by: Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.Arizona and the West, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1968), pp. 377-378Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40167339 .

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REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS

THE FRONTIER AGAINST SLAVERY: Western Anti-Negro Preju- dice and the Slavery Extension Controversy. By Eugene Berwanger. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967. 176 pp. $5.95.

Professor Berwanger argues that most Westerners opposed the extension of

slavery, not for humanitarian feelings for the Negro but because they were

extremely prejudiced against Negroes as persons and as economic competition. California miners and frontier farmers alike feared for their social and economic status as well as for their daughters, if enslaved or free Negroes were allowed to settle in their midst. Most Westerners shared the negative stereotype of the Negro common to Northern as well as Southern white Americans before the Civil War. As a result of these stereotypes and fears, Western lawmakers, bowing to the will of their constituents, favored the exclusion of all Negroes, free as well as slave, from their states and enacted laws discriminating against the Negro in suffrage, court testimony against whites, militia duty, and marriage to whites. So anti-

Negro were these Westerners that they advocated the colonization of the Negro back in Africa to rid them of their dreaded presence. According to Berwanger, the more the Westerners talked against slavery, the more they discriminated

against the free Negro. Thus on the eve of the Civil War, to be "anti-slavery" meant not only that the person was against the extension of slavery but also

against the rights of free Negroes as well. The term "abolition" was disapprovingly associated with Negro equality as well as emancipation.

Professor Berwanger's book is a product of our times historiographically. Not

only does he deal with the recently discovered Negro on the hitherto white frontier, but his book provides an elaboration of some of Leon Litwack's themes in North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1 790-1 860. Essentially Berwanger deals in more detail with points raised by Litwack and others in relation to those areas of the Trans-Appalachian West in which settlers argued

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378 ARIZONA and the WEST

over the introduction of chattel slavery: primarily the Old Northwest, Iowa, Cali- fornia, Oregon, and Kansas. Although most of this story has been told before, Berwanger integrates the various current articles and updates the old state studies by a detailed analysis of delegate origins and debates over Negro exclusion and legal discrimination in territorial and various state legislatures, constitutional conventions, and state referenda. He studies the socio-economic background and

previous residence of delegates and legislators, and provides statistics on the various referenda held on admission of slaves and free Negroes. As a result of stressing the importance of previous residence, Berwanger devotes half of his book to the Old Northwest, because it so frequently provided the legal precedents and settlers for the other areas.

This reviewer was left with only a few questions after reading the book.

Why was there no mention of the underground railroad, or rather the lack of it, when the reality as opposed to the myth, according to Larry Gara's The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad, would have supported Ber-

wanger's thesis? If those Kansans in the Topeka Movement who favored Negro equality and saw slavery as a moral evil came from New York and New England, why did not Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin move increasingly in the same direction, as those states were increasingly settled by people from New York and New England? Why was the Old Northwest so adamant on the

question at all? This question seems only partially answered in the book. Lastly, why was the book organized by region when the author admitted that such

organization made for constant repetition of the same old story in each newly settled area? Would not a topical presentation have been better? Or would that have resembled Litwack's book too much? Professor Berwanger condensed his dissertation into this brief book, but even this brevity seems too repetitious and too long for the few points made.

Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.

The reviewer is a member of the history faculty at the University of Minnesota, and is the author of Salvation and the Savage.

FORGOTTEN PEOPLE: A Study of New Mexicans. By George I. Sanchez. Albuquerque: Calvin Horn Publisher, 1967. 98 pp. $5.75.

MIRACLE HILL: The Story of a Navaho Boy. By Emerson Blackhorse Mitchell and T. D. Allen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. 230 pp. $5.95.

These volumes, both rather brief, provide valuable perspectives on problems of basic contemporary significance - the complex problem of various minority

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