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2 books match the query 'Dempsey, Terrell'
Breaking America
The Radical Abolitionists of Quincy, IllinoisTerrell Dempsey
University of Missouri Press, 2026
In this engaging new work, Terrell Dempsey and Patrick Hotle draw from newly discovered and underutilized primary sources to craft a detailed narrative history of the rise of a group of radical abolitionists in Quincy, Illinois, and the outsized, if mostly overlooked, influence they had on the dissolution of the Union.
The story begins with the 1830 arrival in Marion County, Missouri, of Dr. David Nelson, a Presbyterian minister and supporter of the American Colonization Society. After hearing a speech by Theodore B. Weld, Nelson was converted to the abolitionist cause and went on to recruit Elijah Lovejoy into the region’s nascent anti-slavery movement. Nelson’s activities resulted in the creation of an active anti-abolitionist organization in Northeast Missouri that ended up running him out of the state and across the river to Quincy, Illinois, at the same time Lovejoy sought shelter in Alton, Illinois.
In Quincy, Nelson and a group of like-minded moderate anti-slavery activists opened a manual labor school called the Mission Institute. Following the murder of Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob, a small band of abolitionists at the Mission Institute became radicalized and decided to aid enslaved people in their quest for freedom. After three of these abolitionists were captured in Missouri and sentenced to twelve years in prison, others at the Mission Institute published a call for the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society to organize an underground railroad in Illinois. The Society officially committed to assisting enslaved people to escape slavery in May of 1842, which triggered a hostile reaction from enslavers in Missouri who went on to organize patrols, seek stricter state laws, and attempt to sabotage the underground railroad in neighboring Illinois.
In Breaking America, Dempsey and Hotle demonstrate the impact of the Quincy abolitionists on the later Dred Scott cases. The authors trace a sequence of revivals, public meetings, daring escapes, over-reactions, judicial decisions, and violence, providing a roadmap for how Missouri judicial opinion changed from “once free, always free” to “once a slave, always a slave” under Missouri Law. Breaking America is an important new addition to the history of abolitionism, the Dred Scott decision, and the eventual dissolution of the Union.
Searching for Jim
Slavery in Sam Clemens's WorldTerrell Dempsey
University of Missouri Press, 2005
During Sam’s earliest years, his father, John Marshall Clemens, had significant interaction with slaves. Newly discovered court records show the senior Clemens in his role as justice of the peace in Hannibal enforcing the slave ordinances. With the death of his father, young Sam was apprenticed to learn the printing and newspaper trade. It was in the newspaper that slaves were bought and sold, masters sought runaways, and life insurance was sold on slaves. Stories the young apprentice typeset helped Clemens learn to write in black dialect, a skill he would use throughout his writing, most notably in Huckleberry Finn.
Missourians at that time feared abolitionists across the border in Illinois and Iowa. Slave owners suspected every traveling salesman, itinerant preacher, or immigrant of being an abolition agent sent to steal slaves. This was the world in which Sam Clemens grew up. Dempsey also discusses the stories of Hannibal’s slaves: their treatment, condition, and escapes. He uncovers new information about the Underground Railroad, particularly about the role free blacks played in northeast Missouri.
Carefully reconstructed from letters, newspaper articles, sermons, speeches, books, and court records, Searching for Jim offers a new perspective on Clemens’s writings, especially regarding his use of race in the portrayal of individual characters, their attitudes, and worldviews. This fascinating volume will be valuable to anyone trying to measure the extent to which Clemens transcended the slave culture he lived in during his formative years and the struggles he later faced in dealing with race and guilt. It will forever alter the way we view Sam Clemens, Hannibal, and Mark Twain.