Slavery had become too lucrative, to too many slaveholders, for emancipation to be Jefferson’s work of those days.15 For Jefferson, the Missouri Question was personal. If slavery could not continue its western expansion, his finances might be affected by the decreased demand for enslaved Africans in the domestic slave trade. As he agonized over the future livelihood of the United States and his own economic prospects, Jefferson could not have helped but think of the nation’s past and his own past—and how both had reached this point of no return.
