A Fire Bell in the Past

The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume I, Western Slavery, National Impasse

Jeffrey L. Pasley, John Craig Hammond, Jeffrey L. Pasley, John Craig Hammond

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780826274588
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Many new states entered the United States around 200 years ago, but only Missouri almost killed the nation it was trying to join. When the House of Representatives passed the Tallmadge Amendment banning slavery from the prospective new state in February 1819, it set off a two-year political crisis in which growing northern antislavery sentiment confronted the southern whites' aggressive calls for slavery's westward expansion. The Missouri Crisis divided the U.S. into slave and free states for the first time and crystallized many of the arguments and conflicts that would later be settled violently during the Civil War. The episode was, as Thomas Jefferson put it, "a fire bell in the night" that terrified him as the possible "knell of the Union."Drawing on the participants in two landmark conferences held at the University of Missouri and the City University of New York, this first of two volumes finds myriad new perspectives on the Missouri Crisis. Celebrating Missouri's bicentennial the scholarly way, with fresh research and unsparing analysis, this eloquent collection of essays from distinguished historians gives the epochal struggle over Missouri statehood its due as a major turning point in American history.Contributors include the editors, Christa Dierksheide, David N. Gellman, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, Robert Lee, Donald Ratcliffe, Andrew Shankman, Anne Twitty, John R. Van Atta, and David Waldstreicher.

PART I

BACKGROUND TO THE MISSOURI CRISIS, 1770–1820

1. The Centrality of Slavery

Enslavement and Settler Sovereignty in Missouri, 1770–1820

John Craig Hammond

WHITE MISSOURIANS DEMONSTRATED their strong commitment to enslaving others long before the Missouri Crisis. Indeed, European settlement was inextricably tied to enslavement, captivity, and bondage in Missouri during the half century stretching between initial European colonization in the 1770s and the Missouri Crisis of 1820.¹ In the late 1770s, permanent European settlements on the west bank of the Mississippi River had been in place for only a short time. The mostly French-descended inhabitants deemed the enslavement of Africans a precondition for establishing permanent settlements that would be integrated into the larger political economy of the lower Mississippi Valley, imperial North America, and the Atlantic world. Sensing an opportunity to use the resources of the Spanish state to acquire enslaved Africans far away from the main routes of the Atlantic slave trade, in 1777 the European inhabitants of Missouri petitioned the Spanish Crown for assistance. The settlers asked “that the compassion of the King should deign to provide them with negro slaves on credit, for whom they may pay with the crops.” Spanish officials obliged in assisting the French-descended colonists in obtaining enslaved Africans from markets downriver in New Orleans. From the 1770s through the 1790s, the population of enslaved Africans grew rapidly in Missouri, while white Missourians reclassified enslaved Native Americans as “negroes.”²

By 1804, when American officials arrived to claim sovereignty over Missouri per the terms of the Louisiana Purchase, perhaps 20 percent of Missouri’s non–Native American population was enslaved and classified as “negro,” and the European American settlements in Missouri straddled the ill-defined line separating societies with slaves from slave societies. Regardless of where exactly Missouri fell on the spectrum between slave societies and societies with slaves, the most vocal and prominent white Missourians insisted that the United States commit itself to keeping enslaved Africans in slavery. The “Committee of the Town of St. Louis,” for example, demanded that the United States implement laws to “keep the slaves in their duty according to their class; in the respect they owe generally to all whites, and more expressly their masters.” American officials obliged, and over the next fifteen years the population of enslaved Africans in Missouri grew: slowly at first, rapidly after 1815. By 1819, perhaps ten thousand of the sixty thousand non–Native Americans in Missouri were black and enslaved, and Missouri still bestrode the ambiguous line between a society with slaves (where gradual emancipation remained a distinct possibility) and a slave society (where gradual emancipation seemed unlikely). James Tallmadge sensed that the comparatively small number of slaves in Missouri welcomed some kind of gradual abolition plan. But the majority of politically active white Missourians rejected the Tallmadge Amendments out of hand; they rejected every proposal for some kind of gradual abolition program at the state level, threatened disunion should Congress insist on restrictions, and proceeded to elect strictly proslavery candidates to the Missouri Constitutional Convention. During the Missouri Crisis, many white Missourians insisted that they would “never become a member of the Union under the restriction relative to slavery.” They meant it.³

The Missouri Crisis has rightfully come to occupy a central place in the historiography of slavery and politics in the early republic. Since 2006, seven monographs and numerous articles and book chapters have afforded the Missouri Crisis a central place in their narratives and analyses. Some have used the Missouri Crisis as the conclusion to an early epoch of the politics of slavery that began with the American Revolution and closed with the Missouri Compromise.⁴ Others have found in the Missouri Crisis the genesis of a new form of national political parties committed to protecting slavery.⁵ Still others have used the crisis as an inflection point to examine why southern whites adopted a proslavery ideology or why white northerners retreated from antislavery politics.⁶ The chapters in this volume analyze the Missouri Crisis from all of those perspectives while developing several new ones.

Yet for all of the insights produced by scholarship old and new, historians have written far less about struggles between slaves and slaveholders, enslavement and emancipation, in prestatehood Missouri and the broader confluence region.⁷ Major works examining the Missouri Crisis have focused far more on white people in the East arguing about Missouri slavery in the abstract than on white Missourians’ efforts to create a slave society and African American challenges to their enslavement. The new history of slavery and capitalism should provide some redress to this oversight. Those works have been invaluable in uncovering the processes by which whites created plantation societies in the Deep South while examining the never-ending series of challenges to slavery, both internal and external.⁸ Yet Missouri falls outside the model of a plantation society employed by the new historians of slavery and capitalism. As a result, these works overlook the processes by which settler colonists and imperial powers created new slave societies in the middle Mississippi Valley. This omission is striking given that the slave societies of the middle Mississippi Valley and the southern interior both originated in the Atlantic plantation complex’s “second slavery,” the period between the 1770s and the 1810s that resulted in the great growth and expansion of slavery from its eighteenth-century core in places such as Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, and the coastal colonies of British North America to once peripheral places such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Louisiana, the southern interior, and the Ohio and Missouri Valleys.⁹ Collectively, the new history of capitalism and slavery along with the robust literature on the Missouri Crisis overlooks the lives of free and enslaved African Americans in prestatehood Missouri and the processes by which whites created and maintained various systems of bondage and enslavement. Likewise, the meanings and significance of slavery and racial subordination to the white inhabitants of Missouri are almost entirely overlooked in the historiography of slavery and politics in the early republic and the new history of slavery and capitalism.¹⁰ Why do we have a “Missouri Crisis” but no “Indiana Crisis” or “Alabama Crisis”? How and why was a slave society constructed in Missouri? How did the quotidian lives of enslaved people in Missouri differ from those in Mississippi? The best literature on the Missouri Crisis and the new history of capitalism has no good answers to those questions.

Between 1770 and 1820, in what would become the state of Missouri, slavery was central to processes of European settlement and development, conquest and colonialism, and governance and incorporation into the contested imperial worlds of North America. Slavery was less important to settlement and sovereignty in places such as Ohio and Indiana, between the 1790s and the 1810s, and in later periods such as the 1830s. That’s why we have a Missouri Crisis, but no Ohio, Indiana, or Iowa Crisis. Slavery had long been tied to settlement and sovereignty in Illinois. That’s why there were nearly Illinois Crises in 1818 and 1824. Slavery, settlement, and sovereignty were coterminous with each other in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana long before the United States acquired those regions. There were brief “Natchez” and “Louisiana” Crises in 1798 and 1804 when the United States created territorial governments for these regions, but Congress quickly acceded to the demands of white enslavers in those territories. The situation with Missouri in 1819 would be different. European settlement and claims of sovereignty became inextricably tied to state support for slavery in Missouri between the 1770s and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and again between 1803 and 1819. White commitment to enslaving others ran so deep—whether in the 1770s, 1804, or 1819—that it is difficult to envision a feasible path to gradual abolition in Missouri short of the kind of massive war and rebellion that led to abolition during the U.S. Civil War. Slaveholders and would-be slaveholders in Missouri proved to be as defensive about their particular institution as their counterparts in Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Whether in the 1770s, 1804, or 1819, for white Missourians imperial state power was to be deployed to keep slaves in slavery, not to facilitate their emancipation, immediate or gradual.¹¹

And while white Missourians’ firm commitment to slavery makes it difficult to envision a peaceful path to emancipation in Missouri, enslaved Native and African Americans challenged their bondage in numerous ways. Shifting jurisdictional and legal regimes combined with the diverse origins of enslaved Missourians to permit some African Americans to challenge the legality of their enslavement. Likewise, the unsettled, indeterminate structures of social, political, and economic life in the Missouri borderlands created spaces that slaves exploited to claim freedoms within slavery, even when they found themselves unable to flee or challenge the legality of their own personal enslavement. Missouri’s borderland location and the inability of Missouri slaveholders to maintain widespread social, economic, and institutional commitments to keeping slaves in slavery afforded enslaved men and women continuous opportunities to blur and sometimes challenge the lines between slavery and freedom, emancipation and enslavement. At the same time, because Missouri never underwent the plantation revolutions that transformed places like Louisiana, and because Missouri never fully crossed the threshold that separated societies with slaves from slave societies, on three occasions between 1770 and 1820 lawmakers in Washington and Madrid tried to force white Missourians to adopt some kind of gradual abolition plan. In each case, Missouri’s powerful class of slaveholders and would-be slaveholders fought off all such external efforts to effect such a move.

Slavery’s initial expansion and then great growth in Missouri occurred in the four decades between the Seven Years’ War and the Louisiana Purchase. Beginning in the 1760s, imperial conflicts led to the expansion of the Caribbean plantation complex into the lower Mississippi Valley, as Spain and Britain used state support for slavery as an important tool of empire building. The establishment of plantation economies in the lower Mississippi Valley led, in turn, to the transformation and growth of slavery upriver in the Missouri and Ohio Valleys, where farmers and planters increasingly used enslaved Africans to produce food and stores for plantations downriver. In the process, Native American slavery ended—on paper, at least—as Native American slaves were transformed into African American slaves. In that forty-year span, African American slavery became central to economic, social, and political life in the imperial Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Valleys. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase at the start of the nineteenth century, these regions composed a distinct Mississippi Valley plantation complex that was part of a broader Atlantic world of empires, commerce, and slavery. Whether in New Orleans or Natchez, Ste. Genevieve or Shawneetown, Creole elites in the broader Mississippi Valley plantation complex made claims on imperial states as they sought to mobilize power locally so that they could enslave Africans and then keep them in slavery.¹²

In the early 1700s, the banks of the Mississippi in present-day Missouri constituted something of a middle ground between competing Native American nations. European settlers from the French Illinois Country—habitants—began migrating across the Mississippi River to mine lead and to trade for furs and salt with Osages from the Missouri and Arkansas Valleys in the 1720s. In the 1750s, trading and mining camps began to take the form of more permanent agricultural, fur-trading, and diplomatic settlements. The outcome of the Seven Years’ War divided European claims along the Mississippi River, ceding the Ohio Valley to Britain and the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys to Spain. Seeking to integrate the region into Spain’s new Mississippi Valley empire, Spanish officials used state support for slavery to encourage habitants to settle in Spanish Missouri and to cultivate their loyalties to the Spanish Crown. In the 1750s, the French Illinois Country—which encompassed the settlements on the west bank of the Mississippi—was oriented as much toward French Canada as it was toward Louisiana. Likewise, economic life in the scattered French villages comingled Native American slavery and the fur trade toward Canada, with African American slavery and the production of staples and stores for Louisiana. In the 1770s, Spanish officials used their shared Catholicism to lure across the river habitants now living under Protestant British rule. To incorporate those habitants into their new Mississippi Valley empire, Spanish officials also worked to shift the economic and geopolitical orientation of the Missouri Country from fur trading and the Great Lakes to agricultural production for Louisiana. Finally, Spanish officials sought to maintain peace with the numerous and powerful Indigenous nations who lived in the Mississippi Valley and along its many tributaries. Combined, these imperial imperatives would shape the transformation of slavery in Missouri from initial European settlement through the Louisiana Purchase.¹³

Bondage, captivity, and slavery of various kinds were more or less ubiquitous among the diverse peoples and polities of the North American continent in the eighteenth century. Spanish officials immediately learned—as would their successors—that European Americans in the middle Mississippi Valley saw the enslavement of others as inseparable from settlement. Spanish officials’ first census of the Missouri settlements counted twenty-nine Native American slaves at the agricultural-oriented village at Ste. Genevieve and sixty-nine Native American slaves at the fur-trade-oriented village of St. Louis.¹⁴ Fearful that the trade in Native American captives would incite wars and raids that they were ill-equipped to fight off, Spanish officials initially banned the enslavement of Native Americans.¹⁵ But Spanish officials just as quickly learned that an outright prohibition on Native American enslavement so deeply clashed with the customs of the Illinois Country that any enforcement of the decree would undermine whatever authority Spain might be able to exercise over the habitants. Spanish officials instead opted to ban the further enslavement of Native Americans and to prohibit the trade in Native American captives. Such measures were of little effect. Habitants immediately defied the ...