Although Missouri has strong cultural ties to the Upper South and major economic links to the Deep South, most historians have focused their agricultural studies on states other than Missouri. In Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie, Douglas Hurt provides the first systematic study of agriculture and rural life in one of the most vital sections of Missouri prior to the Civil War. This seven-county area along the Missouri River known as Little Dixie was the most important hemp-, tobacco-, and live-stock-producing region of the state, as well as a major slaveholding area. The people who settled Little Dixie had emigrated primarily from Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. They brought southern culture with them and adapted it to their new environment economically, socially, and politically. Although the settlers began as subsistence farmers, unlimited opportunities and access by river to New Orleans and St. Louis made commercial farming possible almost immediately. Hurt provides the reader with a broad discussion of land acquisition, settlement, and town development in the region. He surveys the major agricultural endeavors of the southerners who settled there, considering technological change, agricultural organization, breed improvement, and transportation. Hurt also traces the development of rural life, emphasizing the importance of religion, education, and mercantile activities. Slavery permeated all aspects of society in Little Dixie. Hurt discusses the acquisition and sale of slaves, their management, and the political protection of slavery, and he relates the significance of slavery in Little Dixie to the Deep South. One of his most important findings concerns theextensive trade of slave children in Little Dixie. Farmers and planters, driven by the struggle for profit, supported both slavery and the Union. Consequently, political division in the state mirrored the national debate over slavery but also showed the uniqueness of Missouri, both geographically and culturally. This book will prove useful for anyone interested in American agricultural history, the economic and social history of the Upper South, and Missouri. Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie provides a much-needed overview of the region's past.

This dissertation examines the cultural and educational history of central Missouri between 1820 and 1860, and in particular, the issue of master-slave relationships and how they affected education (broadly defined as the transmission of Southern culture). Although Missouri had one of the lowest slave populations during the Antebellum period, Central Missouri - or what became known as Little Dixie - had slave percentages that rivaled many regions and counties of the Deep South. However, slaves and slave owners interacted on a regular basis, which affected cultural transmission in the areas of religion, work, and community. Generally, slave owners in Little Dixie showed a pattern of paternalism in all these areas, but the slaves did not always accept their masters' paternalism, and attempted to forge a life of their own.

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This book provides a perspective into the past that few students and historians of the Civil War have considered: agriculture during the Civil War as a key element of power. The Civil War revolutionized the agricultural labor system in the South, and it had dramatic effects on farm labor in the North relating to technology. Agriculture also was an element of power for both sides during the Civil War—one that is often overlooked in traditional studies of the conflict. R. Douglas Hurt argues that Southerners viewed the agricultural productivity of their region as an element of power that would enable them to win the war, while Northern farmers considered their productivity not only an economic benefit to the Union and enhancement of their personal fortunes but also an advantage that would help bring the South back into the Union. This study examines the effects of the Civil War on agriculture for both the Union and the Confederacy from 1860 to 1865, emphasizing how agriculture directly related to the war effort in each region—for example, the efforts made to produce more food for military and civilian populations; attempts to limit cotton production; cotton as a diplomatic tool; the work of women in the fields; slavery as a key agricultural resource; livestock production; experiments to produce cotton, tobacco, and sugar in the North; and the adoption of new implements.

James T. Scott's 1923 lynching in the college town of Columbia, Missouri, was precipitated by a case of mistaken identity. Falsely accused of rape, the World War I veteran was dragged from jail by a mob and hanged from a bridge before 1000 onlookers. Patricia L. Roberts lived most of her life unaware that her aunt was the girl who erroneously accused Scott, only learning of it from a 2003 account in the University of Missouri's school newspaper. Drawing on archival research, she tells Scott's full story for the first time in the context of the racism of the Jim Crow Midwest.

On Slavery’s Border is a bottom-up examination of how slavery and slaveholding were influenced by both the geography and the scale of the slaveholding enterprise. Missouri’s strategic access to important waterways made it a key site at the periphery of the Atlantic world. By the time of statehood in 1821, people were moving there in large numbers, especially from the upper South, hoping to replicate the slave society they’d left behind. Diane Mutti Burke focuses on the Missouri counties located along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to investigate small-scale slavery at the level of the household and neighborhood. She examines such topics as small slaveholders’ child-rearing and fiscal strategies, the economics of slavery, relations between slaves and owners, the challenges faced by slave families, sociability among enslaved and free Missourians within rural neighborhoods, and the disintegration of slavery during the Civil War. Mutti Burke argues that economic and social factors gave Missouri slavery an especially intimate quality. Owners directly oversaw their slaves and lived in close proximity with them, sometimes in the same building. White Missourians believed this made for a milder version of bondage. Some slaves, who expressed fear of being sold further south, seemed to agree. Mutti Burke reveals, however, that while small slaveholding created some advantages for slaves, it also made them more vulnerable to abuse and interference in their personal lives. In a region with easy access to the free states, the perception that slavery was threatened spawned white anxiety, which frequently led to violent reassertions of supremacy.

In this deeply researched prequel to his 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, Michael J. Pfeifer analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. Pfeifer examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. He addresses the transformation of ideas and practices of social ordering, law, and collective violence in the American colonies, the early American Republic, and especially the decades before and immediately after the American Civil War. His trenchant and concise analysis anchors the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching of slaves in antebellum America. Pfeifer also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context, from the early modern British Atlantic to the legal status of collective violence in contemporary Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Seamlessly melding source material with apt historical examples, The Roots of Rough Justice tackles the emergence of not only the rhetoric surrounding lynching, but its practice and ideology. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, Pfeifer shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.