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‘‘Uncontrollable Necessity’’: The Local Politics, Geopolitics, and Sectional Politics of Slavery Expansion
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‘‘Uncontrollable Necessity’’ The Local Politics, Geopolitics, and Sectional Politics of Slavery Expansion John Craig Hammond In one of the most oft-repeated statements from the early republic, Thomas Jefferson likened the Missouri Controversy to an unexpected ‘‘firebell in the night.’’ Jefferson knew better. In November 1818, New Yorker James Tallmadge tried to block the admission of Illinois into statehood because slavery was ‘‘not sufficiently prohibited’’ in its constitution. Six months earlier, New Hampshire Republican Arthur Livermore had proposed amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit slavery ‘‘in any State hereafter admitted to the Union.’’ Over the previous twenty years, Northern Republicans had repeatedly fought to limit slavery’s growth in the Southwest and to keep it out of the Northwest entirely. Hardly a startling ‘‘firebell in the night,’’ the Missouri Crisis was the culmination of twenty years of Northern efforts to restrict slavery’s Western expansion. Jefferson also charged that the ‘‘firebell in the night’’ was a false crisis, the work of cryptoFederalist Clintonians who schemed to use slavery to unite the North behind their bid to gain power. Again, Jefferson knew better. Loyal Northern Republicans initiated the crisis and provided solid support for the Tallmadge Amendment , fighting, as they had always done, against slavery and its expansion. Finally, Jefferson warned that the sectional passions unleashed by the Missouri Crisis heralded a ‘‘knell to the Union.’’ In that, Jefferson was more right. Yet the threat that slavery restriction might sunder the Union along geographical lines was not entirely new either. Previous Northern efforts to rein in slavery expansion had been defeated by the very real fear that restrictions on Western slavery might lead to disunion—not along Northern and Southern lines, but between the Atlantic states and the Trans-Appalachian West.∞ With the publication of Glover Moore’s The Missouri Controversy, Jef- ‘‘Uncontrollable Necessity’’ 139 ferson’s interpretation of events would enter the historiography of politics and slavery in the early republic.≤ And there it would remain, in one form or another, for the next fifty years. Moore, of course, modified the specifics of Jefferson’s interpretation, and historians have systematically challenged Moore’s main points. Yet Moore’s conclusions—and Jefferson’s interpretation —still remain generally accepted in the historiography. As recently as 2001, a leading political historian could charge that the Missouri Crisis had been ‘‘a kind of surrogate presidential politics,’’ played by New Yorkers seeking to take power from the Virginia dynasty. Similarly, a distinguished historian of sectional politics could conclude that the Missouri Controversy arose out of Northerners’ sudden ‘‘realization that under the ‘Virginia dynasty’ . . . the national prospect had been weighted heavily in favor of slavery.’’≥ But the recent outpouring of scholarship on the politics of slavery in the early republic , coupled with long-standing challenges to the Moore-Jefferson interpretation , beg for a new interpretation of the conflicts over slavery expansion that culminated in the Missouri Controversy.∂ In the three decades preceding the Missouri Controversy, Northern Republicans repeatedly sought to halt slavery expansion. These efforts failed because of the weaknesses of the American Union in the early American West. Through 1815, the main sectional conflicts over slavery expansion were fought between the Atlantic states and the Trans-Appalachian West. Rather than battling Southern slaveholders, Northern opponents of slavery expansion contended with fervently proslavery Western planters, farmers , speculators, and merchants. This polyglot group of expatriated Americans , British loyalists, French planters, and ‘‘men of no country’’ threatened disunion whenever Congress considered restrictions on Western slavery. Through 1812, local circumstances in Kentucky, the Southwest Territory, the Mississippi Territory, and the Louisiana Purchase assured that white settlers already there would favor the continuation of slavery under American rule. Imperial struggles for the Trans-Appalachian West, the uncertain loyalties of white Westerners, and the weaknesses of the American Union in the West meant that Congress was forced to accept these decisions. The year 1815, however, marked a dramatic turning point in the struggle over slavery’s growth in the West. The Napoleonic Wars had destroyed any European designs for a mid-continent empire, and the end of the War of 1812 solidified Western loyalties and consolidated the place of the West in the American Union. The years after 1815 also witnessed the emergence of a more aggressive antislavery politics at the local, state, and national levels, much of it led by obscure Northern Republicans. By 1819, it seemed all but [3.237.51.235] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:14 GMT) 140 John...