Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (review)

Now that slavery has been restored to its rightful place in the historical literature as the fundamental cause of the American Civil War and as the key question in the war itself, historians have sought to determine when and how the slavery issue rose to such prominence in the years between the Revolution and the outbreak of sectional warfare. Matthew Mason, in Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, joins this effort to measure the growing significance of the slavery issue in the early nineteenth century. He forcefully argues that historians have mistakenly maintained, in what he calls the "out of nowhere interpretation," that the Missouri controversy had few roots in the political battles of the period between the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808 and the divisions surrounding Missouri's petition for statehood (3).

Mason carefully reviews the years before the Missouri crisis, demonstrating the growing importance of the slavery issue during a time that historians usually describe as dominated by national concerns and east–west conflicts. Slavery, Mason claims, never went "unchallenged" in this period, and northern opposition regularly brought predictable reactions from the South (5). He maintains that the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808 marked a turning point after which the slavery issue took on an increasingly central role in the political debate, particularly during the War of 1812, which Mason calls a "milestone" in the "politics of slavery" (88).

New England's Federalist opponents of the war frequently blamed the South's enhanced power in the House of Representatives for the conflict. In particular, they argued that the increased representation given to white southerners by the three-fifths clause enabled passage of the Embargo Act and other measures that New Englanders viewed as inimical to their interests. Furthermore, the British offer of freedom to runaway slaves during the war and the American demand for compensation for lost human property afterward heightened tensions surrounding the slavery issue. As a result of the war and its aftermath, Mason concludes, Americans "saw the bonds of their still-fragile Union attenuated by their disagreements over slavery" (105).

Mason is quick to emphasize that African Americans played a critical role in the development of slavery as a political issue during the early national period. The white South's attempt to control increasingly rebellious slave behavior, especially its pursuit of fugitive slaves, became a source of North–South tension. The political activity of free blacks in both sections also contributed to the rising discord by encouraging and inspiring protest in the slave population.

Following the War of 1812, northern fears of slavery expansion dominated that section's perception of the southern threat. The northern concern was that its own freedoms were at risk from an ever-expanding institution of human bondage. Mason even argues that this concern was so central that it contributed to the formation of a northern sectional identity. In the Mid-Atlantic states, anxiety arose from the presence of slave catchers who operated there. In the Old Northwest, alarm focused on the danger of the actual spread of slavery to the region. And all the North was shocked by the number of kidnappings of northern blacks that had been carried out to feed the labor needs of the growing and spreading cotton plantations of the South. The northern reaction to these perceived threats in turn provoked a southern reaction, which, Mason shows, was characterized by a waning of the lesser-of-two-evils position and even some early expressions of the positive-good argument and of strict constructionist, state-rights theory.

The Missouri crisis obviously involved "an unusually sustained and intense" level of political debate over slavery, but for Mason it only "exposed and exacerbated but did not create" sectional tensions (179). "The legacy of a decade's worth of political combat involving slavery," he concludes, "was on display" (179). Key to northerners' concerns in the Missouri controversy, Mason explains...