Journal of the Early Republic

This volume is that rare thing: an edited collection in which the whole is considerably greater than the sum of the parts. Pasley, Hammond, and their authors offer a profound reconsideration of the early republic, challenging the edifice built by historians like Gordon Wood, in which race and slavery register as distractions from the main thrust of post-Revolutionary consolidation.

The editors' Introduction proposes revisions on multiple fronts, since "the first two decades of the nineteenth century remain one of the least studied and most poorly understood periods in American history" (11). This gap reflects the periodization of the First Republic (1790–1860) as a series of discrete chunks (the Era of Federalism, the Age of Jackson, and so on), avoiding the larger continuity of sectional contestation over the problem of slavery. Positing the struggle in 1819–1821 as a fulcrum in this [End Page 642] larger dynamic indicts the blinkered historiography of the early republic, which has never "dealt easily or accurately with anything connected to the Missouri Crisis: slavery, the trans-Appalachian West, or even the nineteenth century" (11).

This volume not only challenges scholarship that elides the centrality of slavery; it also poses a powerful corrective to historians of race and slavery who elide formal politics. In the editors' sum-up, "By the 1990s, historians working on the social and cultural history of race and slavery often felt free to eschew political events altogether" (15). That silence made it easier for political historians to pose grand narratives skating over the "peculiar institution."

With great brio, this volume rides into the terrain left open by these mutually reinforcing exclusions. Putting the Missouri Crisis at the center of post-Revolutionary history, its authors explore both the "crisis" itself and what it represents, the long struggle over the explosion of racial capitalism inside a putatively republican order. What was hidden is revealed; the partisan fissuring of the Era of Good Feelings is no longer a meaningless churn; Jackson's southwestern wars no longer predestined "expansions"; James Tallmadge's amendment to bar slavery from Missouri not premature sectionalism but the eruption of rising antislavery outrage.

The biggest shift proposed here is not temporal but spatial. In decisive ways, its authors turn the focus back to the West and away from Congress. Most previous studies (Glover Moore's pro-southern The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821 in 1953; Sean Wilentz's influential 2004 article in the Journal of the Historical Society; Robert Pierce Forbes's groundbreaking The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath in 2007) focused on maneuvers in and around Washington.¹ Missouri and the frontier into which it fit scarcely figured, a testament to enduring regional prejudices. No longer!

Collectively, these essays clarify that the extraordinary influx of slaveholders into Missouri after 1810, and the possibility that such men would control the entire frontier, was the issue—not sectional power plays. Obviously, the latter precipitated the crisis: Tallmadge represented a strongly [End Page 643] antislavery constituency, as Sarah Gronningsater explicates with great subtlety, and, as John Van Atta outlines, the South felt threatened by "an aggression not just on slavery and slave-state sovereignty but also on them personally and their cultural identity … a comprehensive northern attack on the entire structure of their society, on their concept of manhood and the roots of their self-respect" (189).

A re-centering on the trans-Mississippi West linked to both the juridically slaveless Northwest Territory and the new Cotton Kingdom is explored in three key articles (John Craig Hammond, "The Centrality of Slavery: Enslavement and Settler Sovereignty in Missouri, 1770–1820"; Robert Lee, "The Boon's Lick Land Rush and the Coming of the Missouri Crisis"; Christa Dierksheide, "Border Control: Slavery, Diffusion, and State Formation in the Era of the Missouri Crisis"). Dierksheide, in...