Matthew Mason

The Maine and Missouri Crisis: Competing Priorities and Northern Slavery Politics in the Early Republic

Historians’ standard narrative arc of sectional politics from the Missouri Crisis of 1819-1821 through the Civil War – a tale of recurring and increasingly polarizing sectional conflicts – has enormous benefits, but also encourages a uniform picture of the political impact in the North of debates centered on slavery. In this rendering, Northern politicians who voted for compromise with the South (“doughfaces”), being at least functionally proslavery, suffered at the hands of an antislavery electorate whenever slavery formed the subject of national debates. But taking doughfaces seriously shows that their popularity ebbed and flowed across space and time depending on the priority voters assigned to slavery amongst the mix of political questions vying for their attention. Indeed, looking at the Missouri Crisis from the Maine point of view necessitates a change in something as fundamental as this episode’s name. The local dynamics of the struggle allowed Maine’s doughfaces to negotiate their stance from a position of strength that most doughfaces did not enjoy. This essay not only sheds light on aspects of well-known events in American history – from the Missouri Crisis in general to Jefferson’s famous “firebell” letter in specific – but also offers a case study meant to exemplify the advantages of attention to particular Northern sub-regions and states. Moreover, by attending as much to the middle ground as to the diverging sectional poles in their study of slavery debates, scholars will come to a more complete understanding of the complexity of the United States’ politics of slavery.

Federalists, Abolitionists, and the Problem of Influence

Recent scholarship on the emergence of antebellum American abolitionism tends to trace this movement’s intellectual genealogy to one predominant ancestor. But close analysis of the impact of New England’s Federalists on its abolitionists highlights the complexities that too often elude this scholarship. The evidence for this influence is more often suggestive than conclusive. New England Federalists’ style and many of their concerns echoed in abolitionism. But this conclusion requires a much shorter inferential leap than to declare that Federalism made abolitionism. This article serves as a case study not only of the complex roots of abolitionism, but also of the many obstacles scholars typically face when attempting to solve the problem of influence.

Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists by Bruce Laurie (review)

been begging the ABCFM for years to send him a wife. Likewise, the ABCFM sent a second batch of single women because the Reverend Lorenzo Lyons, a widower, sought a wife to help him raise his young child. The author made this mistake because she relied on a smattering of published primary and secondary sources for her analysis of the Sandwich Island mission. In addition, she also used the Anglicized spelling of Hawaiian names. It is important that scholars use appropriate Hawaiian spellings and diacritical marks. I cannot say the author made similar mistakes in interpreting aspects of other missions. But Conroy-Krutz fails to give any discussion of her research or the sources she uses. Her citations suggest that she has relied primarily on secondary sources, the published sources of the ABCFM, and some primary sources in the ABCFM and LMS archives. There is also a lack of individual citations for quotes and a failure to use citations in the introductions to her chapters. While these problems with sources frustrate scholars, most students and those with a general interest in missions will be satisfied with the clear writing and overall analysis of this monograph.

Internationalizing the Civil War

I n 1854, Abraham Lincoln lamented that slavery “deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions to taunt us as hypocrites.” In 1858, he dismissed American slaveholders’ arguments as the same “arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world [,] . . . the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” In 1861, he argued that Americans must fight against secession in part so as “to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion.” More famously, in his 1863 Gettysburg Address he declared the United States’ experiment with self-government “the last best hope of earth.” Why would Lincoln have repeatedly taken such a global view of American issues? As was his wont, with such utterances he was encapsulating the thoughts of millions of Americans, rather than inculcating something radical and new. Both of the books under review here illuminate that Lincoln did not need to persuade his audience to embrace an international frame of reference. Although it has been increasingly fashionable for historians of the United

Complicating Slavery: Teaching with Runaway Slave Advertisements

Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the American Revolution was the abolition of slavery in the northern states. It ended slavery where it had once flourished, began the process of reconstructing black life in freedom, and initiated a series of emancipations which eventually banished slavery from the Americas. With abolition, slavery was no longer a continental institution, but a sectional one. The North became the land of freedom; the South the land of slavery. Since that division became the basis of the titanic struggle that led to the Civil War, it is important for students to trace it back into the eighteenth cen tury. This exercise is designed to force students to look at Ameri can slavery with different eyes and rethink the nature of both northern and southern society. Slavery was marginal to some parts of the northern economy and society in the colonial period, but central to others. In the mid-eighteenth century, slavery expanded in the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Throughout the North?especially in these Mid-Atlantic states?slaveholders fiercely contested abolition after the war, therefore progress to wards its completion was painfully slow. Nevertheless, it was the American Revolution that put the North on the path to becoming the free states. To understand the impact of the Revolution, students must appreciate the importance of slavery in the northern colonies prior to emancipation. Exposure to the history of slavery in the North challenges the traditional understanding of chattel bond age as a peculiarly southern institution. Indeed, the runaway advertisements that feature northern masters hunting down slaves who had fled to southern colonies reverse the image of fugitive slaves following the North Star to freedom. Slave advertisements can also lead perceptive students to question the equation of slavery with people of African descent, and vice versa. Reading about white servants running away with black slaves, or about black slaves passing as free, imparts a sense of the complex nature of colonial slavery and servitude as well as race and class.