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  • The Missouri Controversy and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America
  • John Craig Hammond (bio)
The Missouri Controversy and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. By Robert Pierce Forbes. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 384. Map. Cloth, $45.00.)

How did white Americans move from their "post-Revolutionary consensus concerning the evil of slavery and sanguine expectations of its rapid demise" to their "Jacksonian-era rejection of abolitionism and acquiescence in the institution as ineradicable and not incompatible with the principles of the Union"? (2). The Missouri Controversy and Its Aftermath only begins to address this important question. According to Robert Pierce Forbes, the Missouri Controversy made slavery's future the central political issue of the 1820s. A decade of political conflicts over slavery ended only with Martin Van Buren's deliberate creation of [End Page 122] the Second Party System, which expressly served "the mutual goal of slaveholders to defend slavery from national attack and of Democratic leaders to mobilize slaveholders as a political bloc" (8). By the 1830s, Van Buren and the Democratic Party had pulled off one of the great ideological coups in American history: They redefined the meaning of both slavery and America by creating a new, conservative narrative of American history that protected slavery by denying its significance and by placing any criticism of it beyond reproach.

Forbes begins his account with the controversial claim that James Monroe entered the presidency intent on strengthening the bonds of union through internal improvements and reform, including "a radical campaign to eliminate slavery and the African presence from American life" (15). Like many other white Americans, Monroe was committed to a program of compensated emancipation and forced removal that would eradicate slavery from a progressive, reform-minded, postwar America. When set against the undeniable growth of slavery after 1815, this broad reformist, nationalist, and antislavery agenda set the stage for the Missouri Controversy that began in 1819.

Thus, when New York Congressmen James Tallmadge proposed restrictions on Missouri slavery, a simple question of Missouri statehood immediately became "a referendum" on the meaning of slavery in America (43). Forbes provides a detailed survey of the sectional positions for and against restrictions, along with the political, partisan, and ideological considerations that informed them. Northerners expressed their opposition to slavery on a variety of pragmatic, constitutional, ideological, and political grounds. Though southerners found themselves on the defensive, most remained reluctant to articulate or embrace a "positive good" defense of slavery. Ultimately, the Missouri Crises and Compromises would lead to two ominous developments. "At once rendering slavery more racial and racism more national" (119), they demonstrated that the "issue of slavery could not be discussed publicly without exposing unbreachable fissures in the Union, and thus, to preserve the Union, nothing should be said about slavery at all" (120). It would take moderate antislavery white Americans over a decade to learn this lesson.

In Forbes's analysis, political conflict in the 1820s involved struggles between three groups seeking to determine slavery's future. Led by James Monroe, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams, reformers and nationalists remained committed to a federally sponsored program of emancipation and removal. Historians tend to dismiss colonization, but [End Page 123] Forbes ties it to other issues, explaining why it fired the imagination of reformers and nationalists through the 1820s. The tariff and the sale of the national domain could finance the compensated emancipation of slaves as well as the building of canals. Monroe's "amalgamation" of parties would allow nationalists to build broad coalitions of voters and politicians to support improvement and progress. The economic stagnation of slavery in the Upper South made whites there open to proposals for compensated emancipation and removal, while skeptical Upper South politicians might support emancipation if it came with the promise of federal funding for a new road or canal through their district. Finally, the election of John Quincy Adams in 1824 and his appointment of Henry Clay as Secretary of State and heir apparent to the presidency promised nationalists sixteen years of presidential power to enact their heady visions of reform and improvement. In the early 1820s, many voters and...

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