Dividing the Union: Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise by Matthew W. Hall (review)

Matthew W. Hall’s Dividing the Union: Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise offers a refreshing perspective on the Missouri Compromise. Hall creates a parallel narrative between the rise of Thomas’s political career and the erection of a federal dividing line between slave and free soil. Born along the Potomac River at the beginning of the American Revolution, Jesse Burgess Thomas, like many men of his generation, sought landed opportunity along the Ohio frontier. First moving to Kentucky as a child, Thomas then settled in Indiana Territory in 1803. There, Thomas married a wealthy widow, invested in land, and managed to be elected to the territorial assembly. In 1808 Thomas was elected as Indiana’s territorial delegate to Congress, where he successfully machinated to separate the proslavery Illinois Territory from Indiana. After completing his term of service in the nation’s capital, Thomas resettled again, this time in Illinois Territory. The Thomas family relocated to what was colloquially known as Egypt, the southern, proslavery section of Illinois. In Illinois Thomas rose from territorial judge, to state constitutional delegate, and then to United States senator. By this time Thomas had become the owner of at least six enslaved persons, which likely colored his political decisions regarding slavery in Illinois. As presiding officer of Illinois’s 1818 state constitutional convention, Thomas spearheaded a constitution that allowed for the continuation of racial slavery as “indentured servitude,” that permitted the importation of slaves for work at government salt mines, and that contained provisions to potentially transform Illinois into a proslavery state.

Hall’s narrative climaxes with Thomas’s service as a U.S. senator. Just a few months into his first Senate term, Thomas found himself mired in both the Panic of 1819 and the Missouri controversy. While Thomas was deeply interested in public land as a salve to the panic, he also became one of the leading compromisers during the Missouri crisis. Here Dividing the Union temporarily shifts its focus away from Thomas and toward an intricate discussion of the figures behind the Missouri Compromise. For more than a year, three issues split Congress over admitting Missouri to the Union: gradual emancipation as a condition of statehood, restriction of slave importation after statehood, and limiting slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase. Thomas never gave any significant remarks during the crisis; he did, however, help shepherd the ultimate compromise bills through both houses of Congress. Such political adeptness allowed Missouri to be admitted as a slave state without restriction to slave importation, Maine to be admitted as a free state, and Missouri’s southern boundary to be set as the line separating slave territory and free. Yet Thomas’s success in suspending sectional crisis did not provide him long-term dividends, for his political career declined as Jacksonian partisanship rose in the wake of the 1819 panic. A political enemy of Andrew Jackson and with few allies and little of substance in the congressional record, Thomas returned to the Old Northwest in 1829. In Ohio Thomas turned his attention to landed enterprise, became a Whig, and sponsored the local antislavery Episcopal church. Dividing the Union provides great insight into the complexities of the so-called Era of Good Feelings, the problematic legacy of the Northwest Ordinance, and the ambiguity of free soil in the Old Northwest. For if Thomas’s compromising attitude on slavery maintained the Union in 1820, his suicide in 1853 likely evinced his remorse at his complicity in aiding the slaveholding faction. The Missouri Compromise lasted only another year; the Union it saved, another seven.