Reviewed by Eva Sheppard Wolf | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4

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Reviewed by Eva Sheppard Wolf | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Eva Sheppard Wolf, San Francisco State University

Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. By Matthew Mason. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 351 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
It seems that Thomas Jefferson should at least have smelled smoke before the Missouri Crisis struck "like a fire bell in the night."¹Matthew Mason's new book offers extensive and persuasive evidence that slavery had played an important role in national and sectional discourse well before 1819. Focusing on the second decade of the nineteenth century and especially on the changes brought by the War of 1812, Mason argues that "antebellum strife over slavery took the shape it did in large part because of developments and lessons learned in that crucial decade" (237) before Missouri applied for statehood.	1
To argue for the importance of the years 1808–19 in creating a sectional politics of slavery, the book must downplay the salience of slavery in the earlier period, a departure from many recent works that have located slavery centrally in revolutionary-era debates and events. Mason points out, however, that in the late eighteenth century proliberty, antislavery views were widely disseminated. Partisans of the era consequently found the subject of slavery could serve as a political tool in the national power struggles that arose as soon as there was any national power over which to struggle. Mason's argument here, repeated throughout the book, is that employing slavery as a tool in political exercises "exposed slavery to scrutiny and raised the stakes surrounding it" (31).	2
After the ending of the foreign slave trade in 1808, New England Federalists who hated Republicans' policies toward England, hated the embargo, and hated the War of 1812 showed just how useful slavery could be as a tactical weapon against one's political opponents. Federalists attacked Virginia Republican leaders where they seemed weakest: as slaveholding aristocrats (positioning themselves, then, as antiaristocrats) whose power arose from an unfair representation of slave property through the three-fifths provision of the Constitution. There had been some ominous sectional rumblings even before 1808—in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, some Federalists began to talk of secession—but Mason downplays these concerns to focus on widespread anti-southern hostility during the war years. That hostility culminated in the Hartford Convention's proposed constitutional amendments, which would have redistributed sectional power partly by repealing the three-fifths provision.	3
We know that feelings in the subsequent Era of Good Feelings actually were not so good, so it makes sense that northern attacks on slavery and slaveholders continued even after the "debacle of the Hartford Convention" (75). Interestingly, the center of sectionalist gravity moved southward, into the mid-Atlantic states where residents felt increasingly anxious as they watched slavery expand around them and read horrific reports of free blacks being kidnapped from their homes and sold as slaves in the Southwest. Antislavery northwesterners faced a more immediate threat from those who wished to legalize slavery in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and they too began to attack slavery and slaveholders in newspaper essays and pamphlets. Southerners responded to these antislavery writings; a few began to assert a states-rights philosophy and make tentative arguments that slavery was a positive good and a greater number denounced what they perceived as misguided northern philanthropy.	4
Those who spoke and wrote about slavery during the Missouri Crisis, then, had plenty of precedent and ill feeling to draw on. Yet the event marked a break as the depth of the crisis forced both pro- and antislavery writers to stake out more consistent and extreme positions. The legacies of the period 1808–21 reverberated through the antebellum era and are carefully traced in the book's final chapter.	. . .

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