Leslie A. Schwalm . Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest . (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press . 2009 . Pp. xii, 387. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.

Abstract

For a region including few blacks, the Upper Midwest states of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in the late nineteenth century have yielded a rich historiographical lode to the persistent and wide-ranging explorations of Leslie A. Schwalm. Tracing the fortunes of the African-American migrants who arrived during the Civil War, this study sheds new light on Reconstruction as a national phenomenon, race relations in a supposedly racially liberal society, and gender relations within the communities the migrants created. The book begins by demonstrating that, while the 1787 Northwest Ordinance in theory defined freedom as the normative status in the antebellum Upper Midwest, white racism made a form of bondage for blacks too often the practice. Through a heritable form of indentured servitude, slave-owning privileges for army officers, and loose adoption laws, whites succeeded in holding African Americans to long terms of service. All three states disfranchised blacks and banned them from jury service; Iowa also adopted statutes prohibiting black settlement, testimony against whites, militia service, practice of law and intermarriage with whites, and requiring school segregation. “Racism,” Schwalm concludes, “was not imposed on Midwestern whites by outsiders; it was integral to the region's history and development” (p. 29).