Debates about the specific year the U.S. was founded have become increasingly acrimonious. Is 1619 the correct date? 1776? Opinions remain sharply divided. Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond do not suggest that 1821 (the year of the Second Missouri Compromise and Missouri’s admission to the Union) should be in the running for the date of the U.S. founding. However, they do contend that paying more attention to this important year helps focus attention “on a neglected topic of the American experience that poses a difficult intellectual challenge for scholars tracing out the ways that the local and the particular interacted with the national and the global to shape lives, ideas, and institutions” (4). Pasley, the Frederick A. Middlebush Chair of History and Associate Director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri, and John Craig Hammond, an Associate Professor of History and Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at Penn State University-New Kensington, explain that the primary purpose of this book is to “focus the study of the ‘Missouri Question,’ as the controversy was called in its own time, where historical accuracy demands: on slavery and race” (5).
Part I of the book, “‘The Missouri Question” in National Politics,” contains essays by Michael J. McManus, Christopher Childers, and Miriam Liebman. McManus offers a detailed overview of the “torturous path that finally, and barely, brought the [Missouri] crisis to a conclusion” (39). McManus provides a good overview of the maneuvering over the Missouri Question as well as helpful background information for some of the other chapters in this volume. Scholars often treat the Missouri Compromise as if it settled the pressing questions it raised. However, as McManus and other scholars in this volume note, the questions raised by the debates over Missouri remain open and unsettled.
Christopher Childers presents readers with a detailed reexamination of President James Monroe’s leadership style during the Missouri Crisis. Monroe’s actions, Childers contends, “reveal a president willing to play party politics to its fullest and a leader intent on preventing any challenge to his power and his political philosophy” (73). Scholars sometimes overemphasize nonpartisanship in their accounts of Monroe’s presidency, but Childers presents a compelling case that Monroe was a zealous partisan who readily played the game of party politics “in an effort to get his way on the compromise issue and to prevent a challenge to his reelection” (90). His actions, and those of many of his contemporaries, run counter to traditional narratives of nonpartisan politics during the so-called Era of Good Feelings.
Liebman concludes this part of the volume with a discussion of how the writings of Louisa Catherine Adams provide scholars “with the opportunity to analyze the Missouri Crisis and Compromise through the eyes of a leading women in early America” (99). Louisa Catherine Adams inserted herself into the Missouri debates and offered delightfully acerbic commentary about many aspects of the crisis, including Speaker of the House Henry Clay’s maneuvering: “the honesty of our Congress has been displayed in such exalted colours this Session that the next generation will certainly have cause to be proud of their fathers” (113). McManus, Childers, and Liebman help scholars think about the power and resonance of “The Missouri Question.”
Part II, “Answering the Questions in Missouri and Across America,” features contributions by Kate Masur, Diane Mutti Burke, Richard Newman, and Zachary Dowdle. Masur’s essay focuses on state-level citizenship and African American migration. Masur argues that the Second Missouri Crisis had a profound impact on “understandings and practices of citizenship” (132), although scholars have never really recognized this point. Richard Newman’s essay complements Masur’s because both scholars see the debates over Missouri as inaugurating either a new beginning of sorts or a turning point. For Masur, the debate “opened the door to four decades of hard-fought controversy about the citizenship status of free African Americans” (157). For Newman, the Missouri Compromise represented a turning point, or a phase change, in Black activism. Newman contends that African Americans became “perhaps the most dynamic and uncompromising political constituency in antebellum society” (198) and a new generation of Black activists emerged to forcefully assail concession and compromise.
Readers will be interested in tackling Newman and Dowdle’s essays alongside each other. Both scholars agree on the importance of the Missouri Compromise but differ as to the particulars. For Newman, the compromise marked a critical turning point in Black politics. For Dowdle, it had a paradoxical legacy. “The compromises that ended it promoted the growth of slavery and muzzled any open opposition,” he observes, but it also “created a geography of free soil that would eventually strangle the institution” (229). In other words, the Missouri Compromise helped shape the region by isolating and weakening slavery. As Masur and Newman show it also helped shape the nation. Mutti Burke contributes an essay assailing the tenacious idea that slavery in Missouri was somewhat better or more benign than elsewhere in the U.S. South. Slavery in Missouri was just as brutal and exploitative as anywhere else; in her chapter, Mutti Burke foregrounds enslaved people’s resistance. The questions raised by Missouri mattered in Missouri, of course, but they also rippled outward across the United States.
Nicholas P. Wood, David J. Gary, and Matthew Mason contribute to Part III, “Legacies of the Missouri Crisis in American Political Culture.” Wood offers a fascinating discussion of the word “doughface,” an epithet that “quickly became one of the antebellum era’s premier political insults” (259). John Randolph of Roanoke, Wood argues, referred to a children’s prank. Children sometimes put dough on their faces and dressed as ghosts to scare other children, but often ended up scaring themselves. Randolph thus used “doughface” to mock people who wanted to restrict slavery in Missouri. He jeered that they were bluffing, that they could not scare the south into submission, and that they acted only from self-interest, not humanitarianism. Northerners quickly appropriated the word and used it to “condemn fellow northerners whom they viewed as subservient to the South” (259). Scholars, Wood asserts, have contributed to the confusion by mixing up what happened. Randolph did not use “doughface” to insult northerners who voted with the south, but to insult restrictionists. It was northerners who invoked the insult “to promote sectional unity on a range of issues, some of which had little to do with slavery” (261).
David J. Gary argues that Rufus King’s speech about the Missouri Crisis deserves to be better understood because it was “one of the first true proclamations of what would become the doctrine of the Free Soil and Republican Parties of the antebellum period” (276). Just as Randolph helped, albeit inadvertently, to shape northern politics with his use of the word “doughface,” King had an equally powerful impact on politics. Matthew Mason argues that rhetorical positions taken during the Missouri Crisis mattered a great deal and contends that “the Missouri Crisis shared more with other debates in other times that touched on fundamental principles like liberty and slavery than with debates in its own time centering on more routine policy preferences” (302). Mason analyzes the Missouri Crisis alongside the Imperials Crisis of the 1760 and 1770s. Ultimately, in both periods, “antagonists in intense, prolonged debates pressed their opponents, and constituents pressed their representatives, to examine many of their customary theses” (318).
Part IV, “Reframing the Question Continentally,” concludes the volume. Edward P. Green argues that local politics in Missouri turned on efforts to subjugate Indigenous peoples. Thus, he contends, “restoring the centrality of Native Americans to early Missourian politics clarifies and explains the concerns that bound white Missourians together before, during, and after the increasingly virulent debates over the admissibility of slavery in Missouri” (326). Missouri’s admission to the Union was a watershed moment in U.S-Native American relations, although scholars have not paid much attention to the demands that emanated from Missouri for the dispossession and expulsion of Native Americans. Finally, Peter Kastor offers a wide-ranging essay that situates Missouri in continental and hemispheric perspective. Kastor finds that the Missouri Crisis was not as unusual as many scholars have portrayed it. Rather, it was part of an extended era of tumult that rippled throughout the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Kastor’s essay is a fitting final chapter for a volume that offers extended local, state, national, continental, and hemispheric analysis of the Missouri Crisis and its aftermath.
Pasley and Hammond’s proposed “1821 Project,” they argue, should “allow for new themes to emerge and old issues to be seen from unfamiliar angles” (5). The contributors to this volume have indeed interrogated new themes and examined old issues with new lenses. Anyone interested in U.S. history, specifically, slavery and race, the Missouri Compromise, and the antebellum period, will find this book enlightening.
Evan C. Rothera teaches history at the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith.
