A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume I, Western Slavery, National Impasse (Volume 1)

by Jeffrey L. Pasley (Editor), John Craig Hammond (Editor)

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.

 

Genres: History, American History

440 pages, Hardcover

Published July 21, 2021

About the author

Jeffrey L. Pasley is professor of history at the University of Missouri.

Reviews

[Kenneth Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being from Missouri my knowledge of the Missouri Compromise was pretty much limited to knowing that the date of the compromise was 1820. The background leading up to the compromise is well explored here and shows how instrumental it was in shaping the future of the United States.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and cutting edge research. This book has the potential for causing a paradigm shift in the way that scholars discuss the battle over slavery in the United States.