In this sweeping saga that spans empires, peoples, and nations, M. Scott Heerman chronicles the long history of slavery in the heart of the continent and traces its many iterations through law and social practice. Arguing that slavery had no fixed institutional form, Heerman traces practices of slavery through indigenous, French, and finally U.S. systems of captivity, inheritable slavery, lifelong indentureship, and the kidnapping of free people. By connecting the history of indigenous bondage to that of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, Heerman shows how French, Spanish, and Native North American practices shaped the history of slavery in the United States.

The Alchemy of Slavery foregrounds the diverse and adaptable slaving practices that masters deployed to build a slave economy in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, attempting to outmaneuver their antislavery opponents. In time, a formidable cast of lawyers and antislavery activists set their sights on ending slavery in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, Lyman Trumbull, Richard Yates, and many other future leaders of the Republican party partnered with African Americans to wage an extended campaign against slavery in the region. Across a century and a half, slavery's nearly perpetual reinvention takes center stage: masters turning Indian captives into slaves, slaves into servants, former slaves into kidnapping victims; and enslaved people turning themselves into free men and women.

Whereas historians often talk about the expansion of the U.S. Slave Empire in national terms, this chapter shows the international and diasporic dimensions of slavery’s growth in the United Staten. It does this by exploring the kidnapping of apprentices from Barbados into Texas. Centering one case from 1835, it traces how the end of slavery in the British Caribbean triggered forced migrations into the nearby plantation sector in the U.S. South.

During the late eighteenth century, servants, apprentices, and free people of African descent were taken into captivity in one nation and enslaved in another. Abolishing this kind of international slavery in motion comprised an element of the antislavery agenda for abolitionists in the United States. Existing work on the early antislavery movement has focused largely within national contexts and on abolitionists’ dogged attempts to abolish the institution of slavery. Yet abolitionists had to create cosmopolitan antislavery strategies to dismantle the kinds of coerced mobility that rendered people enslaved in foreign realms. Captives and their abolitionist allies worked to make freedom papers a key part of antislavery law. Scholars have ably shown that freedom papers could be protectors of liberty, and examining attempts to eradicate slavery in motion helps to unpack why and how documents acquired important power. Crafting antislavery law and politics to end the coerced mobility of servants, apprentices, and free people in the wider Atlantic world fit within a broad antislavery agenda in the early United States.