Unfree Soil: Empire, Labor, and Coercion in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, 1812-1861

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between bondage and conquest along the Upper Mississippi between the War of 1812 and the U.S. Civil War. It connects the range of unfree labor practices that flourished on the Upper Mississippi, in defiance of federal and territorial law, to the political geography generated by settler colonialism and slavery’s expansion. In the mid-continent, where U.S. sovereignty was stretched thin, the law was not the only factor that determined a person’s status. The few federal representatives in the Upper Midwest—Indian agents, army officers, and Christian missionaries—pursued the work of national expansion by illegally holding African Americans in bondage. Simultaneously, they acted to mold Native people into a racially segregated underclass of agrarian workers. The region’s trafficked subjects exploited the limits of federal power to ensure that this labor regime was never complete. Drawing on research conducted across fifteen archives, Unfree Soil finds that free labor could not exist on stolen land.

This research recasts the history of what has often been understood as the free North and West. U.S. historians have demonstrated that westward expansion was a driving force in the nation’s conflict over slavery, but they have paid less attention to the labor and power relations that were already established in the center of the continent prior to the arrival of Anglo-Americans. Recent scholarship examining slavery in the Upper Midwest either ends with the War of 1812 or overlooks the region’s history of Native labor and unfreedom. The colonial archive, however, is rife with sources describing both Native labor and slave labor well into the nineteenth century. This dissertation engages the methods of legal history, Native American history, environmental history, and labor history to contextualize the archive’s fleeting references to the region’s colonized and enslaved inhabitants. In its focus on Native work, Unfree Soil collapses the land-labor binary that has traditionally divided Indigenous Studies from Black Studies. On the Upper Mississippi, the labor of enslaved Black people was central to the expropriation of Native land, and white Americans extracted not just Native land but also Native labor.