The Ragged Edge of Freedom explores the long shadow of slavery in the Lower Midwest. In the decades after the Civil War, elites in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois constantly raised the specter of “cheap” Black labor to divide workers, discipline markets, and gain political advantage. At the same time, powerful outsiders depicted the borderland as dirty and degraded, pathologizing the region’s working poor through a rising capitalist ideology that linked a human’s worth to their economic productivity. Desperate to maintain their precarious standing and avert the phantasma of “negro invasion,” countless Lower Midwesterners envisioned a republic of “free white labor” predicated on the ruthless exclusion of Black “competition.”
Yet, as Matthew Stanley demonstrates, racial division is only one part of this story, as class-based interracialism materialized in unlikely places and against impossible odds. In the heat of border-making and white supremacist violence, ordinary people challenged the free white labor consensus—through bottom-up struggle over shared material goals. From settler dispossession through the age of mass incarceration and deindustrialization, this absorbing book recounts dramatic and previously neglected clashes between workers and the formidable bastions of wealth and power. Stanley excavates the stories of abolitionists, freedpeople, agrarian populists, militant coal miners, and socialists, Black and white, who risked everything in defiance of the region’s restrictive boundaries and its racial capitalist grip. Against a backdrop of blood-stained civil wars and riveting industrial battles in a pivotal yet often overlooked American region, The Ragged Edge of Freedom is a people’s history—one of inspiration and urgency and complex resistance from below.
About the Author
Matthew E. Stanley is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, and the author or editor of four books, including the award-winning, The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America.
What People Are Saying
"This sweeping, gripping study of the Midwestern borderlands captures the history of what Bertolt Brecht called ’social tragedy.’ Stanley shows how large social forces, often propelled by extractive capital, structured the sadnesses that too often led ordinary white people to come to believe the exclusion of Black workers would somehow make for safety and happiness among whites. A major contribution to the history of white identities at the regional level, of moments of interracial resistance, and of the intersections of race and class." ~David Roediger, author, An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education
"An illuminating, illustrative—and often moving—exploration of the toxic price paid by the heedless construction of whiteness.." ~Gerald Horne, author, African Americans and a New History of the USA
"Stanley’s learned study of race and class, economies and emotions, is a strongly documented historical analysis of exploitative capitalism. As a regional study with broader implications, he shows how, pre- and post-Civil War, before and after the creation of unions, institutions sowed racial panic for power and profit, even as whiteness by itself was never a ticket to class mobility. Stanley makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complicated nexus where racial and class politics meet." ~Nancy Isenberg, T. Harry Williams Professor of History (emeritus), Louisiana State University, and author, White Trash
"An unblinking examination of how race reshaped the Civil War-era idea of ‘free labor’ in the lower Midwest, The Ragged Edge of Freedom takes us from slavery, to the troublesome labor history of the region in the early twentieth century. The result is a model for how scholars might approach the intricacies of race and class at the regional level—one that surveys the challenges of collective struggle from below while never losing sight of possible alternatives. Stanley addresses these complex problems in a masterly fashion." ~Mark A. Lause, Professor Emeritus, University of Cincinnati