Reviews in American History

In The Alchemy of Slavery. M. Scott Heerman argues that slavery in the Illinois Country is best described as "slaveries" with diverse origins and shape-shifting capacities. Despite being carved out of the Northwest Ordinance territories and intended by national lawmakers to be free of slavery, Illinois Territory was never without bound labor. Although it lacked plantations and was located far inland from Atlantic commerce, Illinois was a colonial settler society—or rather a series of colonial settler societies—that reflected larger Atlantic patterns of traffic in Indigenous captives and victims of the transatlantic slave trade. By the 1830s, the enslaved population of Illinois Country included the descendants of Native Americans, newly arrived Africans, and bound laborers from surrounding slave states. Transporting enslaved people into a state without legal slavery, southern enslavers turned to contracts to transform slaves into servants bound to serve for life terms. State lawmakers melded together this mosaic population of the enslaved, perpetuating a variegated system of slaveries in which different origins, pathways, and possibilities for emancipation co-existed. The consequence of this amalgam was both unique and typical of American slavery: those who would oppose slavery were forced to deal with the institution's local practices and develop pragmatic tactics rather than follow the abstract principles and political strategies of the national abolition movement.

Heerman begins his study with an account of the simultaneous French incorporation of Africans from the transatlantic trade and indigenous slaves into the early agricultural economy of Illinois Country. By the 1730s, he argues, "Indian slavery and European colonial slavery had coexisted in the Upper Mississippi Valley," with Indian and African-descended slaves "liv[ing] in the same homes, marr[ying] into the same families, and labor[ing] in the same fields" (p. 20). French farmers used slave labor to supply flour to France's other American possessions, one of the many ways they were connected to [End Page 386] Atlantic commerce and slavery even as they negotiated with the Illinois Native peoples who remained the region's dominant political and military power. During the creation of this sedimentary layer of practices, the French Code Noir loosely structured the relationships of master and slave, establishing a legacy of local autonomy that would leave a perpetual mark on slavery in Illinois Country. Together, Indian and African slaves "helped drive a transition to colonial Illinois that made it a staple export economy" (p. 37). With the British victory over France and its Native allies in the Seven Years War, British colonial administrators re-imagined this economy and forged a plan to import enslaved Africans from Pennsylvania and Jamaica. The short-lived tenure of this second empire was no more successful than the French in subordinating local practices to imperial regulations.

Illinois became a territory of the new United States in 1781, when Virginia ceded its holdings to the new nation, thus opening the third chapter in aspirational metropolitan rule. White settlers under the territorial governorship of Arthur St. Clair succeeded in exempting their human property from the emancipation required under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, by crafting a new legal entity, "French negroes," that survived as a protected category until well into the nineteenth century. With the territory still dominated by a robust Illinois Indian presence, the federal government was in no position to enforce the provisions of the Ordinance. In addition, throughout the 1790s, Heerman notes, "slaveholders in Spanish-controlled Missouri routinely sold slaves into Illinois" (p. 73). The pattern of defying metropolitan regulations persisted, fostering pragmatic local cultures of slavery and emancipation and effectively preventing any sectional boundary of slavery to take hold in the Mississippi River Valley.

Early in the nineteenth century, a third wave of white settlement transformed the population of Illinois, increasing it more than tenfold to 150,000 in 1830. The newcomers were often slaveholders, and their presence Americanized the territory's laws of land title and slavery and forced a reckoning with the...