William G. Thomas III, The Border South

Whether marked with the natural features of the Ohio River or the arbitrary survey of the Mason Dixon Line, the border delineated slavery from freedom, and many African Americans living in slavery understood their proximity to it. The Underground Railroad operated through the border region, moving escaped slaves across Maryland and western Virginia into Pennsylvania and Ohio. The stunning insurrection led by Nat Turner in 1831 put the border region's white population on high alert and led to lengthy debate in Virginia's legislature over slavery. It may have been responsible in large part for the white South's fixation on the Border region, since it called forth for them the dangers of slavery's close quarters with freedom. The heated debates around the Fugitive Slave Laws in the 1850s gave political expression to the simple fact of the border--that it could be crossed and that enslaved people sought freedom on its other side.

If enslaved people could cross the border to claim freedom, so too could free men move to strike a blow against slavery. John Brown's raid in 1859 made fears of a slave revolt more real for the white South than even their wild imaginations could dream up. The raid was plotted and staged from just across the Mason Dixon Line in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. His attempt to provoke a slave insurrection carried him just twenty some miles over the line to the two-river town of Harper's Ferry, where a United States Armory and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad seemed to offer the raiders the tools of slave liberation.