This magisterial study, ten years in the making by one of the field's most distinguished historians, will be the first to explore the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, Richard J. M. Blackett traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves.

The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery

I address you on August 28, 2008, on the same evening as the Democratic nominee Barack Obama speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1537592709090021

The Challenge of Democracy: Explorations in American Racial Politics

Becoming Black, White, and Indian in Wisconsin Farm Country, 1850s–1910s

tivities. If the other case studies are as inaccurately reported as is General Motors, the volume, in addition to its other defects, has no historical credibility. In this reviewer’s memoirs, Biography of an Idea, (Simon & Schuster, 1965, pp. 541-556), there is a recital of what actually took place at General Motors during this period. It is completely at variance with what Only By Consent sets forth on pages 95 to 110. Unmentioned in this book is the important fact, from a public relations standpoint, that General Motors started a trend by retaining counsel on public relations at this time. Future historians will be able to get the true facts in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress, where these records have been deposited. Certainly a book covering what this book attempts to cover should be written. It would be a valuable contribution to the social history of the United States. Regrettably, this volume fails in its attempt. EDWARD L. BERNAYS

HANS AUFRICHT. Central Banking Legislation: A Collection of Central Bank, Monetary and Banking Laws, Vol. II: Europe. Pp. xxii, 921. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1967. $10.00:

Located on the Ohio River in western Virginia, adjacent to southeastern Ohio and eastern Kentucky, antebellum Cabell County lay at the fulcrum of east and west, north and south, freedom and slavery Possessed of a bountiful countryside—replete with wildlife, timber, pristine streams and creeks, and rich river-bottom soil along the navigable Ohio and Guyandotte rivers—it held great potential for settlers who sought to put down roots Drawn by its promising location and cheap, arable land, migrants settled in the county in increasing numbers in the early 1800s, and many settlers took their slaves with them Yet like most counties on Virginia’s western border, antebellum Cabell County was, in historian Ira Berlin’s words, a “society with slaves” rather than a “slave society” In contrast to the rice and cotton-growing regions of the Deep South where the institution of slavery shaped the political economy and “the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations,” slavery never became central to the economy or social structure of Cabell County Unlike Kanawha County, Virginia, to the northeast (and from which it was formed in 1809), Cabell County lacked industrial slavery Unlike Jefferson County in the lower Shenandoah Valley, it lacked the numbers to support plantation slavery Distant from plantation society and the rigid social and cultural norms imposed by the planter elite of eastern Virginia, Cabell County reveals the significance of slavery even within a “society with slaves” like central Appalachia, the impact of western expansion on slavery, and the hardening of racial attitudes in the Ohio Valley Equally important, the county’s antebellum history helps illuminate the ways in which African Americans living in this border region exercised agency in order to better their condition 1 By 1810, almost three thousand people resided in Cabell County, including 221 slaves and twenty-five Indians, or as one local historian notes, “about 1 ½ persons to the square mile” In the county’s early years, it had only two villages of note Guyandotte, formed in 1810 at the confluence of the Guyandotte and Ohio rivers, featured a number of businesses and a small but growing port

The African American Experience in Antebellum Cabell County, Virginia/West Virginia, 1810–1865

industry the old master-servant relation of the Boer republics. The Apartheid doctrine, he tells us, is a living political dinosaur. Whether or not the oversimplified dichotomy of paternalistic and competitive societies will really do justice to the complexity of the contrasts involved in these societies, van den Bergh's readers will judge for themselves. It is worth noting however that even he is dissatisfied with them, for he finds it necessary to supplement them with an analysis in terms of eleven other variables. But be this as it may this is a useful contribution to the rela-

Joanne M. Hesslink

Papers

Black neighbors : Negroes in a northern rural community