Reviewed by: Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois by Darrel Dexter Matthew E. Stanley Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois. Darrel Dexter. Cape Girardeau, MO: Center for Regional History, 2011. ISBN 978-1-890551-00-1, 747 pp., paper, $17.00. Recent studies of slavery in Kentucky and Missouri have enhanced our understanding of slavery’s variability and underscored the importance of the institution’s geography and borders. Yet slavery was not relegated to the south bank of the Ohio River. Indeed, slavery was still practiced in Illinois when Abraham Lincoln moved to the “free state” in 1830. Lincoln’s antebellum Illinois was a “quasi slave state,” according to Darrel Dexter, whose new book asserts that both de facto and de jure forms of chattel slavery existed in the impending “Land of Lincoln” between 1720 and 1865 (15). Dexter, a high school history teacher in Cairo, Illinois, [End Page 462] utilizes voluminous research to provide a thorough account of slavery in southern Illinois during the periods of French, English, and American rule. In doing so, and in challenging popular conceptions of North and South, he adds dimension to the story of race and slavery, regionalism, and the coming of the Civil War. Slavery existed in Illinois for well over a century, dating back to at least 1720 (and legally recognized under the French Code Noir of 1724). Although both the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the state’s 1818 constitution outlawed slavery in Illinois, the law was not binding to French inhabitants and other whites who moved there before that date. Whites in Little Egypt—the state’s southern region, between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—practiced bondage intermittently, as county and state officials ignored or made exceptions to state law. As time passed, however, and politics and demography changed, Illinoisans became more concerned with how best to keep blacks out of Illinois than with retaining the semblances of slavery, culminating with the state’s infamous exclusion law of 1853. By the Civil War, Illinois was mostly antislavery and vehemently anti-black, as Leon Litwack and Eugene Berwanger have argued. Dexter claims that Illinoisans practiced five types of term bondage. Indentured servitude, a form of “voluntary” servitude, was legal until 1848. Registered servants, typically those under the age of eighteen who worked in “apprenticeships,” existed in Illinois until 1836. The leasing of slaves was yet another form of antebellum slavery. So many Kentucky slaves were “hired out” to salt mines in Gallatin County, in the south-eastern part of the state, that it often had a greater slave population than some counties in formal slave states. The imprisonment and enslavement of runaway slaves and free blacks was also common in the “free” states along slavery’s border (so common that every county in southern Illinois had slave auctions on the courthouse steps until the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850). The final form of slavery, practiced until 1865, was a locally tailored convict lease system that involved the arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, and “auctioning off” of free blacks who could not pay their fines or court costs. Dexter argues that these five forms of slavery made Illinois a “quasi slave state” before the Civil War. To use Ira Berlin’s paradigm, early Illinois was a society with slaves, not a slave society—Dexter does not overplay his hand. Indeed, the state’s commitment to slavery never approached that of even Delaware, and Illinois’s Union loyalty during and after the Civil War reflected the extent of its commitment to slavery. Yet, as Dexter admits, southern Illinois was not “the North” as it is traditionally understood. Unlike Joanne Pope Melish does in her examination of slavery in the Northeast, however, Dexter hardly broaches whether or not Illinoisans intentionally deleted their slaveholding past. One wishes he (or some other scholar) had pursued more fully such fascinating memory questions and cultural omissions. [End Page 463] Yet Dexter draws from an impressive array of sources, notably county records and census data, to support the important claims he does make. Bondage in Egypt also includes several helpful maps and appendixes featuring an absolute wealth of slave and census data and election returns. As such, Dexter...
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Jul 28, 2016
Young-Seok Kang + 2
Open Access
