Diane Mutti Burke

Slavery was quite unevenly distributed across Missouri, but the state had a greater absolute number of slaves than did Arkansas and several other slave states.
This is the first general study of slavery in Missouri since Harrison Trexler's Johns Hopkins doctoral dissertation was published in 1914. Our interests and the resources available to scholars have changed greatly in a century, so Mutti Burke's study is long overdue.
She finds that what was unusual, if not unique, about slavery in Missouri was that most slaves lived with their owners on small or medium-sized farms. Often the farm owner and his family worked along side their few slaves in the same or in closely related tasks. Sometimes this led to an unusual affection and the owner's greater concern for his or her slaves. In other instances, it led to greater enmity, tension, and violence between slave and owner.
The book's strength is the thorough research behind it and the author's eminently sensible and judicious conclusions. The presentation can become a bit wordy and less than exciting in spots,but it is always nicely balanced and neglects neither the worst nor the best of an institution so strange to us today. All in all, a very impressive and useful piece of scholarship by a scholar of real promise… (plus d'informations)