Over the past decade and a half, scholars of the nineteenth-century American West have focused on the problem of slavery and freedom in western territories that the United States seized from Mexico. New books on chattel slavery, peonage, contract labor, and Indian captivity in the Far West have illuminated both the varieties of unfree labor that existed across the continent on the eve of emancipation and the diversity of people entangled in them. Together, these works are building a new history of the Civil War era that establishes the multiracial West, alongside the North and the South, as a key area of struggle over the future of slavery and the meaning of freedom.
William S. Kiser's Borderlands of Slavery makes important new contributions to this flourishing literature on the unfree West. Kiser argues that the US confrontation with coercive labor systems in the southwestern borderlands shaped the sectional crisis, the...
