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President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and The President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/105/4/843/5352833 by Penn State University (Paterno Lib) user on 23 February 2019 Politics of Slavery John Craig Hammond Historians have long sought to assess the role of President James Monroe in forging and then negotiating the passage of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Their assessments have been written within a historiographical tradition that praises statesmanship over section- alism, celebrates southern statesmen’s invocations of union and nationalism, and elevates compromise to the loftiest of American political values. Within that historiographical paradigm, interpretations of the politics of slavery focus on how sectional extremists ex- ploited the fragility of the Union for their own purposes, and how moderate unionist statesmen intervened to save the Union from sectionalists. In turn, much historical writ- ing seeks to identify sectional threats to union, castigate disunionists, and then celebrate how unionists won in every sectional crisis from the 1770s through the late 1850s, or explain how disunionists triumphed in 1860–1861. Overlapping spectrums of union and disunion, slavery and antislavery, statesmen and sectionalists form a metanarrative that provides an outline for most writing on slavery and politics from the American Revolution through the Civil War. In the broader scholarly literature on the politics of slavery, disun- ionism and narrow sectionalism are cardinal sins; unionism and nationalism are virtues.1 John Craig Hammond is an associate professor of history at Penn State University, New Kensington. He would like to thank Mike McManus, Matthew Mason, David Waldstreicher, Frank Towers, Annette Gordon-Reed, Peter Onuf, Jim Oakes, and the readers and editors of the JAH for their assistance with this article. Readers may contact Hammond at [email protected]. 1 On the causes, course, resolution, and significance of the Missouri crisis, see John R. Van Atta,Wolf by the Ears: The Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 (Baltimore, 2015); Matthew W. Hall, Dividing the Union: Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise (Carbondale, 2016); Michael J. McManus, “President James Monroe’s Domestic Policies, 1817–1825: ‘To Advance the Best Interests of Our Union,’” in A Companion to James Madi- son and James Monroe, ed. Stuart Leibiger (New York, 2013), 438–55; Matthew Mason, “The Maine and Missouri Crisis: Competing Priorities and Northern Slavery Politics in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, 33 (Winter 2013), 675–700; John Craig Hammond, “‘Uncontrollable Necessity’: The Local Politics, Geopolitics, and Sectional Politics of Slavery Expansion,” in Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New Ameri- can Nation, ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville, 2011), 138–60; George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2010), 211–23; Lacy K. Ford, “Deliver Us from Evil”: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009), 112–40; John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, 2007); Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, 2007); and Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006). For grand syntheses that contrast southern unionists’ moderation with sectionalists’ extreme defenses of slavery, see, for example, Eliza- beth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill, 2008); Ford, “Deliver Us from Evil”; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, 1990); and William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (New York, 2007). doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaz002 © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. March 2019 The Journal of American History 843 844 The Journal of American History March 2019 Written within these historiographical conventions, celebrations of a unionist, nation- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/105/4/843/5352833 by Penn State University (Paterno Lib) user on 23 February 2019 alist, and even antislavery Monroe have come to dominate the literature on the Missouri crisis and the politics of slavery from the Revolution though the breakdown of the sec- ond party system in the 1850s. In the first scholarly study of the Missouri crisis, Glover Moore celebrated unionism but dismissed Monroe’s role in forging a compromise due to the president’s alleged ineptness. According to Moore, Monroe was “too undecided in his own mind about Missouri to bring pressure to bear on anybody else.” Lacking the deci- siveness of a George Washington or the intellect of a Thomas Jefferson, Monroe proved unable to guide competing interests to an equitable compromise. Yet even if Monroe lacked the qualities of a statesman, he redeemed himself by signing into law a compro- mise forged by others, despite the determination of hot-headed Virginians to strike for disunion. Writing in the early 1970s, Harry Ammon successfully restored Monroe’s repu- tation from historians such as Moore who “portrayed Monroe as an ineffective and inde- cisive figure during the Missouri Crisis.” Ammon’s Monroe was a thoughtful statesman who, abiding by republican conventions on the role of the executive, “kept his activities on behalf of compromise deeply veiled.” From the 1970s through the early 2000s, his- torians largely ignored Monroe’s role in the Missouri crisis. That historiographical lull changed dramatically with the publication of Robert Forbes’s The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America, which has become the authoritative source on the Missouri crisis and Monroe’s role in shaping its outcome. Forbes’s Monroe is an antislavery unionist and statesman worthy of effusive praise. In Forbes’s analysis, Monroe emerges as the secret leader of a group of “antislavery pragmatists” who recog- nized that slavery threatened to tear the Union asunder. Forbes’s Monroe secured a com- promise intended to set the nation on a decidedly antislavery path, but that antislavery promise was foiled by unprincipled doughfaces such as Martin Van Buren and proslavery southerners who forged a proslavery Democratic party in the 1820s.2 Over the past decade, Forbes’s interpretation of Monroe has become standard in the literature on the Missouri Compromise and the politics of slavery. In a grand synthesis of the period between 1815 and 1848, Daniel Walker Howe borrows directly from Forbes, contending that Monroe supported the Missouri Compromise because he “favored” an antislavery “concession to northern sentiment.” Howe’s Monroe is a disinterested states- man who favored union-saving concessions: southern whites would receive Missouri without resections on slavery; northern voters and politicians would get slavery barred from most of the region encompassed by the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. In an equally grand synthesis of the abolition movement, Manisha Sinha builds on Forbes’s portrait of Monroe, placing him at the head of “a large bisectional coalition of religious and political leaders” who “sought to solve the problem of slavery and race” at the time of the Missouri crisis “by promoting colonization of African Americans.” Likewise, in a recent study on Monroe’s involvement with colonization at the time of the Missouri crisis, Daniel Pres- For a critical analysis of the paradigms that have shaped analyses of disunion and the Civil War, see Frank Towers, “Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War’s Causes, 1861–2011,”Journal of the Civil War Era, 1 (June 2011), 237–64. For criticism of historians’ tendency to naturalize and celebrate union, compromise, and statesmanship rather than analyzing these concepts critically, see David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2009); and Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union. 2 Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821 (Lexington, Ky., 1953), 196, 234–38; Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for American Nationality (1971; Charlottesville, 1990), 367–68. Forbes, Missouri Compro- mise and Its Aftermath, 6, 15–16, 62–68, 69. James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Politics of Slavery 845 ton claims that Monroe “believed that slavery was both unjust and a detriment to the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/105/4/843/5352833 by Penn State University (Paterno Lib) user on 23 February 2019 United States, and that it should be eradicated, not by acts of individual manumission but by comprehensive state or even national emancipation” accompanied by colonization. “A confirmed nationalist dedicated to the preservation of the Union,” Preston’s Monroe knew “that slavery had the potential to destroy the Union” during the Missouri crisis. In a selfless act of statesmanship, Monroe “threw his support solidly behind the compromise” to preserve union. In the most recent studies of the Missouri crisis, John R. Van Atta ar- gues that a unionist Monroe sought unity within the
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