Review of edited collection "A Fire Bell in the Past, Volume I" (2021)
Eds. Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond, A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume I, Western Slavery, National Impasse (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2021), pgs. 414.
A Fire Bell in the Past: Volume I is composed of a series of eleven essays that were gathered from two conferences held in 2019 in Missouri and in New York City. This book represents some of the best cutting edge scholarship on the world of slavery, antislavery, politics, and the shifting narratives of the early nineteenth century. Edited by scholars Jeff Pasley and John Craig Hammond, the essays in this volume are rich in detail, as well as field reorienting energy. This valuable volume not only situates the Missouri Crisis as important (its 200th anniversary was during the COVID-19 Pandemic), but as crucial to understanding the role of antislavery and slavery in politics. More than most volumes over the past decade, this book illustrates that antislavery was a powerful and persistent threat to slavery in the Early Republic. Rather than the Missouri Crisis being an overwhelming victory for slaveholders (though it certainly was in some regards), the Crisis pushed abolitionism in new and more aggressive directions, thereby leading to the growth of a deeper national sectionalism.
In full disclosure, many of the works in this book align with my own scholarship, particularly in portraying American abolitionism as a far more aggressive and assertive force in the early nineteenth century. Unlike many scholars who have framed the early period as a strictly “conservative” era (from 1790s to 1830s), I find this framework unnuanced and lacking historical reality. Furthermore, scholars have too often viewed the era through the Garrisonian pessimism, which casts all those who fought slavery prior to Garrison in a negative and unflattering light. This volume, while not shying away from the "warts” of the era, does much to rehabilitate antislavery in the period.
John Craig Hammond and Jeff Pasley begin the volume with their own review essay, taking their usual swipes at the New Progressive historians (such as Gary Nash) and especially at the Founders Chic (David McCullough, Gordon Wood, and Joseph Ellis) while highlighting the need for this volume. While I find much less to lambast, the editors do an excellent job in demonstrating the need for this new historiographical intervention. Notably absent is any discussion of the past decade of “Slavery’s Capitalism” and the critiques of this hegemonic field that are inherent within this volume. Slavery was not the overwhelming, all consuming, all powerful force that imbedded itself into American life as much of the recent historiography seems to suggest. The editors missed an important moment to not only hit at the Founders Chic (a frequent theme for the new new political historians) but point out some of the serious flaws in broader narratives currently circulating the historical profession.
John Craig Hammond’s essay builds on themes he has argued for the majority of his career, namely that Westerners played a strong pro-slavery role in forcing slavery’s expansion to the West. The Federal government, rather than be portrayed as a strong actor, is coopted into supporting slavery due to fears of losing the West to rival imperial powers, who were more than happy to permit the continued growth of slavery. For these empires, promoting slavery was key to massive economic success. It was the United States that debated and questioned whether to expand slavery westward, to which settlers and their proslavery allies responded resoundingly in favor of such a resolution.
Robert Lee builds on arguments Hammond has been making since the early 2000s that it is the settlers who were pushing the federal government and coopting it to ensure the seizure of indigenous land and expansion of slavery. Looking at the Boon’s Lick migration, Lee is particularly successful in demonstrating that it took first settlers and then compliance by federal officials to drive Native American land seizure. The Boon’s Lick rush (a massive migration to Central Missouri that enabled the call for statehood) was driven by land and not by mineral wealth, thus creating a fairly stable population. It was not until the economic the Panic of 1819 that the rush finally began to cool. In relation to slavery and antislavery, Lee demonstrates that settlers valued slavery because it increased the value of their lands. Many speculators saw Missouri as a future region populated by slaveowners and farms. Thus antislavery efforts in Congress touched off a firestorm of protest. One area that Lee fails in is fully integrating the voice of the lower sorts. Including these lower sorts would have made the narrative more complex as he grappled with the variety of causes that led to the Boon’s Lick land rush.
Jeff Pasley’s contribution to the collection steps back from a narrow Missouri focus and instead examines the crisis through a broader regional lens. He argues that Missouri was at the center of a confluence of ideological and geopolitical trends including antislavery, westward migration, democratization, and the economic explosion of slavery that collided in the territory of Missouri. While not always clear in defining who was driving the statehood push (was it younger or older politicians and factions) and also misses the growth of antislavery in the South (see this book), Pasley is excellent in showing the growing notions of “free soil” and “slave state” prior to the 1820s. Pasley, more than other scholars, includes some references to the religious impetuous of antislavery activists across the North and that it was in the death of the Federalist party that antislavery northerners began to unite against slavery’s expansion into the West. Importantly, Pasley shows that it was a new generation of Congressmen who were the drivers behind the attack on slavery’s expansion. These Congressmen were elected in the aftermath of the 1816 elections and descended on Washington as a bunch of “loose cannons.”
Christa Dierksheide focused her chapter on slaveholders and their ways of viewing diffusion as a way of making slavery “safe” in Missouri. Fears of slave rebellion drove these slaveholders to maintain a system they believed would stand in stark contrast to the Deep South. While there is much to like, I found that far too often Dierksheide was too broad with statements such as “the federal government wanted […]” when in this period the government was broadly divided on the issue. Another challenge with some of Dierksheides’ conclusions is that legislation in this period could adequately control people. However, as seen in some work, such as that by Vernon Palmer (see here), it is clear that there is a large difference between law and practice, particularly in the Antebellum period such that only those laws that were enforced popularly had any effect. Still, one of her final points that Missouri slaveholders’ rationale points to a spectrum of proslavery thought is important. Far too often scholars treat slaveholders of Virginia like those of Natchez. There are differences and exploring those differences allows for a deeper, more complex understanding of the way slavery expanded and changed.
The next essay, by John Van Atta explores the Missouri Crisis through white pro-South eyes This essay focused on newspaper columns and illustrates that the issue of Missouri entering as a slave state was far more complex than simply pro-slavery and antislavery. Van Atta points out that in Missouri some antislavery activists opposed antislavery Congressional efforts because they beleived that the question resdied in the states, not Congress. Like Deiksheide, at times Van Atta is far too broad in his assertions applying what he found to the general body of slaveholders.
Donald Ratcliffe’s essay, “The Surprising Politics of the Missouri Compromise” is incredibly important in demonstrating that to many antislavery activists, the Compromise was a huge victory against slavery by prohibiting it in most of the Louisiana Territory. Examining the “doughfaces” or those delegates who voted in favor of the Compromise with the Southern delegates, Ratcliffe demonstrates that many of these men were deeply committed to antislavery and compromised in order to kill slavery, not allow its expansion. This essay illustrates that antislavery had gained explosive roots in the North and that the electorate punished congressman who voted in favor of the Compromise. This essay deeply unsettles the current framework of American historiography and has the potential to help lead a profound shift in the field.
Sarah Gronningsater follows this essay by exploring the personal life of James Tallmadge Jr., the representative that introduced the amendment to restrict slavery in the new state of Missouri. A well done microhistory, Gronningsater shows the influence of African Americans on people like Tallmadge and the powerful politics of home and family. Drawing from the correspondence of the Tallmadge family, she shows a network of slavery and antislavery that had a profound impact on the young Congressman.
Anne Twitty adds to the collection with her narrative of freedom suits in Missouri during the Crisis, pointing to the way in which people of African descent in Missouri used the law to fight for their freedom and how the Crisis perhaps shaped the legal world around those litigants in the courts. At times this essay was a bit speculative, but the author was careful in stating the limitations of her theories due to the lack of hard evidence.
David Gellman returns to the North in tracing the lives of the Jay family, illustrating the complexities of the Founding generation. Gellman’s essay was well written and extensively researched, providing a framework to view the mixed legacies of the founding fathers of the United States of America. Furthermore, Gellman’s use of three generations of John Jay’s family shows how messy and complex the shifts in antislavery activism were in the Early Republic and Antebellum periods.
David Waldstreicher’s piece was perhaps, in the opinion of this writer, less persuasive. Waldstreicher’s article was largely a rebuttal to the work of Sean Wilentz (Waldstreicher’s footnotes were even more scathing than the essay’s text) and seemed to lack some of the nuance of other essays. Waldstreicher, as the author of Slavery’s Constitution, has continued to insist that the Constitution was a proslavery document that inherently protected the institution of chattel bondage and led to its expansion. Using the life of John Q. Adams, his more cynical take on the transformation of this leader to an antislavery activist missed some of the events in JQA’s life, such as his association with men such as Prince Hall that make the narrative surrounding his move towards antislavery more complex than Waldstreicher suggests.
Finally, Andrew Shankman adds a concluding essay to the volume, tracing the shifts in the ideas of two prolific proponents of the National Republicans’ agenda of transforming the United States, Matthew Carey and Daniel Raymond. In his essay Shankman incoproates the broader Atlantic world to show how revolutions abroad and the failure of Missouri, led these two men to grow enchanted with the project of the National Republicans and move in different directions.
Ultimately, this volume, even in its weaker essays, provides an essential burst of chaotic energy, that if given the right amount of push, may lead the field of early American History towards another paradigm shift on par with that of Slavery’s Capitalism. While the volume is decidedly lacking in the role that religion played in all of this (which was a tremendous amount), it provides useful frameworks, new research, and powerful rejoinders to current arguments commonly accepted as fact. The authors and editors are to be commended for this important and insightful volume that ought to receive increased attention and focus.
Robert Swanson