Paul Buhle
Posted July 23, 2026
The Ragged Edge of Freedom:
Race, Capitalism and Class Struggle in Slavery’s Borderland
By Matthew E. Stanley
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026, 469 pages, $35.
TO APPRECIATE THIS wonderful and hefty volume fully, or perhaps with a combination of appreciation and dread, it might help to have lived within or near the geographic zone explored so intensively. The “borderland” of the title actually covers a large chunk of Illinois and Indiana, with frequent references to Ohio.
Would-be farmers and merchants streamed in during the first half of the 19th century, often traversing westward and northward from the upper South, bringing along their genetic Anglo-Saxonism and their cultural politics. These regions carried subsurface coal waiting to be mined for the rising industrial machine. Stanley, a scholar of race and social history several times over, now teaching at University of Arkansas, tells us early on that he has something more than the specifics of this regional history in mind.
Not so long ago, leading figures of the history profession regarded the modern civil rights movement, with the help of liberal Democrats, as well along the road to righting the past racial wrongs of the nation: Democracy, if imperfect, had worked after all. Stanley, arriving several generations later, stakes out a position deeper into economic and lived history. In the Illinois/Indiana of his intense gaze, areas not far north of the Mason-Dixon Line developed racial dynamics of their own.
Non-white populations scarcely existed in the “Sunset” towns where they could be safe only during daylight hours. Non-white populations in larger commercial/industrial towns lived in “their own” neighborhoods, occupied the lowest ranks of the working class, often enough barred from union membership.
Stanley explains the details wonderfully. Black populations interacted with whites on many levels. After dark and sometimes during the day, if seen in any numbers but especially if also young, they were actively “policed.”
To explain all this demands a firm grip upon local variations, but also and obviously upon local and sub-regional variations over time. Whiteness studies have often blurred the complex complications of race and class, reducing the differences to white privileges without seeing clearly how often exceptions emerged, solidarities across race (or even gender) lines, only to be crushed from above and below.
For Marxists and those influenced by Marxist scholars like famed historian David Montgomery, social relations around the means of production would be central if not all-consuming to our understanding. We need to go back, for starters, to particular white populations in the first half of 19th century.
Political advocates of “free white labor” against potential competition of a geographically advancing slave system found their way into the Freesoil Party, a precursor to the Republicans. Democrats, for their part, believed that the safety of the Republic depended upon the defense of slavery in the South. Abolitionists and social reformers of all kinds, with a wide Yankee following augmented by many recent German immigrants, sought to take things beyond the uneasy accommodation of white populations to each other across existing political lines. In Wisconsin and in Chicago most notably, these would include “Abe’s Boys” enrolling in the army of the Union.
Not so in the Southern Illinois, two hours’ drive from my hometown. The whites who immigrated northward from the near South, largely uneducated and lacking skills, came to be considered almost a species in themselves. Journalists at mid-century began to treat them with a relish shown a few decades earlier, in the popular press, about the “New Southwest” created by the purchase of Louisiana.
In theater as well as popular fiction, from New York to London, swaggering men who killed bears and Indians aplenty met their match in harridans who bragged of gouging out the eyes of romantic rivals. They were larger than life with a vocabulary to match.
Newspapermen of the 1850s quoted by Stanley, recreated these stereotypes, but with deepest disdain: Southern Midwest men and women, both ignorant and violent, shunned education, worked irregularly and undependably, drank heavily and enjoyed nothing more than brawling with each other.
Stanley is quick to say that these populations, in real life, suffered and would continue to suffer for generations from deepest poverty and a lack of the kind of public services needed for a healthy and productive citizenry. They suffered also from a homogeneity so comprehensive that “outside” and “outsider” continued to be regarded as strange and potentially hazardous. Southern sympathies were deep, Abolitionist sentiment worse than suspicious.
Left Behind
The Civil War and the crushing defeat of the South left behind vast numbers of white workers, especially those in the near North of the border states, who “remained conditioned to view Blacks a threats to their jobs, as well as to white women, white property, and white community.” (157)
David Montgomery’s monumental study, Beyond Equality, showed that most leaders of fledgling labor organizations during the 1850s-70s learned little from the War, viewing Black labor as competition. These views hardened in the more organized and mature American Federation of Labor, always with the partial exception of some coal mine communities.
Stanley’s close history of coal strikes, coal communities and the many racial complications is almost overwhelmingly rich with details. Most often, the unions freely admitting African Americans “ignored or tacitly supported the policies required” to protect racial equality in their ranks and on the job. (168) Thus did interracial unionism even “prove compatible with scientific racism.” (169) Black people might for instance deserve equal treatment and inclusion but instead somehow receive, by their inclusion, lower wages, working or safety standards.
Thus did the complicated realities of the 1880s see-saw between inclusion and white racist violence. Journalistic sensationalism switched from “drunk and disorderly” Germans or Irishmen in previous decades to Blacks. Newer state laws in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois sought to stigmatize mulattoes, the living presence of miscegenation, even as the construction of railroads and the opening of new mines brought new populations together and subjected existing ones to the rising power of the corporation.
Early 20th Century Turmoil
Stanley gets to an especially compelling subject, from 1909 to the middle 1930s, only by Part 4 and page 212. What follows is less tied to theories or generalizations about race and class, more about struggles in and around the coal fields, but also the unions that sought to represent workers and the community. Now and then, to drive home a point, Stanley refers directly to the totemic labor history scholarship of older scholars, for instance to the work of Herbert Gutman, as showing the way. In the final 200 pages, we get a goldmine of specifics.
I do like a journalist’s phrase about Little Egypt: “it was a land of horse thieves, kidnappers, counterfeiters, brigands and cave-dwelling pirates.” (220) Our historian almost spoils the beauty of the prose by revealing that this Mark Twainesque description lacked some key specifics.
Actually, as the nineteenth century drew to a close and the new century opened, a class of gentility seized everything they could get their hands on, which was quite a lot. They built mansions, commanded fortunes, and shrewdly developed “formulas for violence” that diverted attention of the white and poor from the blatant, cruel monopolism before their eyes.
It was not difficult to stir racial violence. The “White Caps” of Southern Indiana in the late 19th century promised to terrorize Blacks who crossed state borders, but on careful investigation did most of their vigilante actions to combat “crimes against property.” No rag-tag group, its membership consisted mainly of larger farmers and businessmen. The trickle of scholarship at the turn of the century, finding the poor of Southern Illinois to be “ignorant, shiftless and obstinate” (234), disguised the same gross division of wealth and poverty.
Public segregation by race grew with the founding of educational systems, as segregated housing did alongside. Even local office-holding Republicans feared that more liberal local laws would encourage non-whites to seek out their districts. By 1903, white violence spread like a poison. Eugene Debs, himself formerly a Democrat in the Indiana state legislature, had become by now a militant socialist insisting on the right of African Americans to equal treatment in all things.
Driven from the South by the mechanization of agriculture and drawn to the North by promise of better pay and conditions, Black families arrived in larger numbers. They met hatred and intermittent pogroms, as in Sante Fe, Illinois in 1903, by the mob that grabbed a seventeen-year-old Black teenager from jail, tied him to a tree and shot him hundreds of times, then burned to the ground a nearby Black work encampment set up for railroad work. (257)
As W.E.B. Du Bois commented at the time, no white ethnic group received such treatment. Debs found himself preaching social solidarity as he preached for class solidarity and socialism.
There are instances and historical moments of cross-race solidarity. The United Mine Workers Union, never Jim Crow everywhere, met the rising demand for labor with an appeal for non-discrimination in some fields. A Communist-led alternative made this explicit, although it was beaten back successfully within a few years of its formation. The Progressive Miners Union of the 1930s had more promise, but could not withstand the power of the UMW.
The recurrent “Mob Justice” reflected outright lynchings in the South, but took other forms like the burning of new, integrated schools. Stanley shows again and again, as in the KKK activity of the 1920s, that the worst actions of the Race Wars were not organized by the working class but guided from above.
By the middle 1920s, the Klan had become the center of Little Egypt’s poorest villages. In neighboring Indiana, the UMW successfully fought back efforts of union locals to endorse Klan measures. Eugene Debs, who never recovered from his wartime imprisonment, fought the Klan from his nineteenth century days as an Indiana legislator to the end of his life.
A final chapter reflects upon the region after the Second World War. Union elan faded as the Cold War pressed nationalistic measures. In a generation or two, Supermax prisons replaced mining jobs, poverty at least as bad as Appalachia, and Donald Trump rolled in the votes, promising to save what little coal mines remained.
Stanley draws the searing conclusion: where racial separation and discrimination wins, workers lose.
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