This chapter concentrates on the last resort of the peasantry in the face of the high cost of living and exploitation and coercion by local state agents and dominants. Although direct confrontation was generally avoided, the peasants, when faced with no other alternative, did not hesitate to violate their oppressors. Although historians considered the Anatolian countryside calm and passive due to the rarity of open and massive peasant movements, rural unrest manifested itself through fighting for scarce resources, theft of crops and livestock, attacks on oppressive individuals and the wave of banditry that swept all of Anatolia during the period. This chapter argues that in contrast to the literature, rural crimes and banditry as the most explicit form of rural crimes were predominantly a component of peasants' struggle for survival and their resistance to social injustice rather than a tool of Kurdish nationalist groups or tribal reactions.

Chapters 5–7 bring the story into the 1850s. Chapter 5 opens with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the distinct regional reactions to the legislation. The discussion then turns to the law’s impact on the operations of the Underground Railroad in the Borderland. Though attempts to remand fugitives from the Borderland accelerated, enslaved African Americans continued to strike out for freedom in ever greater numbers. The law empowered slave catchers to retaliate legally and violently against Underground activists, but this added pressure was at least partially offset by the completion of rail transportation networks linking the Borderland with the Upper North, which boosted activists’ capacity to help fugitives traverse the region quickly. Though the new fugitive slave law did not succeed in suppressing Underground activity, it did inhibit resistance to fugitive slave renditions: most fugitive slave rescues in the region in the 1850s employed trickery and misdirection as opposed to the large-scale riots that had characterized the region in the 1840s.