The State, Unfreedom, and Emancipation in the Western Borderlands, a Roundtable

Abstract: Since the early work of Herbert Eugene Bolton, borderlands frameworks have structured much of the scholarship on the North American West. Scholars typically characterize borderlands as places of cross-cultural interaction and limited, competing, or uneven state authority, where face-to-face relationships, kinship ties, and local customs are as significant as the whims of state actors, military officers, government agents, and soldiers. Such dynamics invite us to reimagine prevailing narratives and understandings of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which position both the conflict and its aftermath within an almost inevitable story of national consolidation and burgeoning state power. This roundtable explores the generative complications that borderlands frameworks—longstanding, recent, and emerging—pose to the study of the Civil War, emancipation, and the nineteenth century at large. The contributors highlight the histories and historiographies of various western borderlands, from a broadly conceived Indian Territory to Texas, California, and northern Mexico, and discuss how their conditions of cross-cultural encounter, competing sovereignties, diverse Indigenous polities, varied slaving regimes, and Black self-emancipation prompt reconsideration of the larger prospects, meanings, and tensions of freedom and unfreedom during the mid-nineteenth century.