On Jordan's Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley.

On Jordan's Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley. By Daniel E. Bigham. Ohio River Valley Series. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2006. Pp. x, 428. $45.00, ISBN 0-8131-2366-6.)

A carefully researched and important book on African American life and work, On Jordan's Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley focuses upon communities along the Ohio River from slavery to freedom, from the 1820s to the 1880s. Two-thirds of the study, however, is devoted to black culture in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois between 1865 and 1885. Although the story told here is a familiar one regarding post-Civil War themes such as disfranchisement, racial violence, and the migration of southern freedpeople to the North, On Jordan's Banks is important because of the level of local detail that Bigham employs to discuss these familiar themes, demonstrating local history at its best.

In examining census data from fifty counties north and south of the Ohio River, Bigham adds much to our understanding of free and black communities, particularly in rural areas. As he points out, there are numerous works that focus on large cities like Cincinnati, but fewer scholars have examined the smaller towns and villages along the river. Bigham discusses a wide range of social and cultural features, including work, religion, family, population shifts, and education. Despite their geographical proximity, the free and slave territories of the antebellum period were entirely different worlds for black families along the Ohio River. A short distance made the difference between freedom and slavery, between fractured and more stable families, between physical abuse from forced labor and the prospect of making one's own means. Bigham does not at all glorify life in the free counties, noting that the threat of violence, discrimination, and the absence of educational opportunities existed on both sides of the river. But the two sides of the river may as well have been hundreds of miles apart, for in 1860 only 119 slaves were reported to have escaped from Kentucky (p. 23).

During and after the war, however, the northern counties experienced a large influx of former slaves. This population shift revealed the hatred of blacks in many areas, especially in Cincinnati and New Albany. Democratic politicians and newspapermen played on white fears of the migrating African Americans who were willing to take jobs at much lower wages than whites. The postwar movement into the counties north of the Ohio created black neighborhoods and streets. Other towns were forever changed by this clustering of the black population. But these migrants also suffered much violence; lynchings were common north of the river in the five years after the war.

The last chapters of the book contain some of the most interesting aspects of this local history. Chapter 6 tells fascinating stories of how slaves learned of their emancipation, adding further weight to Steven Hahn's argument about black agency in A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). Also like Hahn's study, Bigham discusses the origins and evolution of segregation and black responses as well as black voting, celebration of Emancipation Day, and ties to the Republican Party. Although Bigham's book does not have the breadth of Hahn's prize-winning work, readers will nonetheless learn much from this meticulously researched account of life under slavery and freedom along the Ohio River.

JONATHAN DANIEL WELLS 

Johnson and Wales University