Many new states entered the United States around 200 years ago, but only Missouri almost killed the nation it was trying to join. When the House of Representatives passed the Tallmadge Amendment banning slavery from the prospective new state in February 1819, it set off a two-year political crisis in which growing northern antislavery sentiment confronted the aggressive westward expansion of the peculiar institution by southerners. The Missouri Crisis divided the U.S. into slave and free states for the first time and crystallized many of the arguments and conflicts that would later be settled violently during the Civil War. The episode was, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “a fire bell in the night” that terrified him as the possible “knell of the Union.”

Drawn from the of participants in two landmark conferences held at the University of Missouri and the City University of New York, those who contributed original essays to this second of two volumes—a group that includes young scholars and foremost authorities in the field—answer the Missouri “Question,” in bold fashion, challenging assumptions both old and new in the long historiography by approaching the event on its own terms, rather than as the inevitable sequel of the flawed founding of the republic or a prequel to its near destruction.

This second volume of A Fire Bell in the Past features a foreword by Daive Dunkley. Contributors include Dianne Mutti Burke, Christopher Childers, Edward P. Green, Zachary Dowdle, David J. Gary, Peter Kastor, Miriam Liebman, Matthew Mason, Kate Masur, Mike McManus, Richard Newman, and Nicholas Wood.
 

Jeffrey L. Pasley is Professor of History and the Associate Director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. His most recent book is The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy, a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.

John Craig Hammond is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at Penn State University–New Kensington and author of numerous books and articles on slavery and politics in the early American republic. He lives in suburban Pittsburgh.

CONTRIBUTORS                                                                                                    xi

FOREWORD
A Reckoning with Slavery                                                                                        xv
D. A. Dunkley

INTRODUCTION
The 1821 Project                                                                                                      3
Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond

CHRONOLOGY
The Era of the Second Missouri Compromise                                                          31

PART I: “THE MISSOURI QUESTION" IN NATIONAL POLITICS

1. “We have gained all that was possible, if not all that was desired”:
Politics and the Passage of the Missouri Compromise                                             37
Michael J. McManus

2. The Missouri Crisis and the Uncontested
Reelection of James Monroe                                                                                    71
Christopher Childers

3. Diplomat, Republican, Lady:
Louisa Catherine Adams and the Missouri Crisis                                                     99
Miriam Liebman

PART II. ANSWERING THE QUESTION IN MISSOURI AND
ACROSS AMERICA

4. The Second Missouri Compromise, State Citizenship, and
African Americans’ Rights in the Antebellum United States                                    129
Kate Masur

5. “Clothing and food are nothing compared with liberty”:
Undoing the Myth of Mild Missouri Slavery                                                             163
Diane Mutti Burke

6. The Other Fire Bell: African American Politics and the
Missouri Compromise before the Civil War                                                             197
Richard Newman

7. A Geography of Free Soil: The Legacy of the 1820 Compromise,
Political Conflict, and the Decline of Slavery in Missouri                                         229
Zachary Dowdle

PART III. LEGACIES OF THE MISSOURI CRISIS IN AMERICAN
POLITICAL CULTURE

8. Doughface: The Origins and Legacy of an
Antebellum Political Insult                                                                                        259
Nicholas P. Wood

9. “Contrary to the law of nature”: The Reconstruction and
Memory of Rufus King’s Missouri Crisis Speeches                                                  275
David J. Gary

10. “General declarations are insufficient”: The Pressure of
Debates and Extreme Rhetoric from the 1760s to the 1820s                                  301
Matthew Mason

PART IV. REFRAMING THE QUESTION CONTINENTALLY

11. The Local Politics of “Indian Affairs”: Diplomacy, Ethnic
Cleansing, and Federal Power in the Age of Missouri Statehood                            325
Edward P. Green

12. The Multinational History of Missouri Statehood and the
Reimagining of North American Polities                                                                   357
Peter Kastor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS                                                                                           385

INDEX                                                                                                                      389