A Fire Bell in the Past

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

Jeffrey L. Pasley, John Craig Hammond

440 pages

Published: July 2021

17 illus.

ISBN: 9780826222312

Studies in Constitutional Democracy

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Price: $45.00

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About This Book: 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.
Authors and Editors: Jeffrey L. Pasley is Professor of History and Associate Director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He is the author of The First Presidential Contest: 1796and the Founding of American Democracy and lives in Columbia, Missouri.

John Craig Hammond is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at Penn State University–New Kensington and author of numerous books and articles on slavery and politics in the early American republic. He lives in suburban Pittsburgh.
Praise For This Book: “The essays in A Fire Bell in the Past are brilliant commentaries on one of the most pivotal events in American history. These fresh perspectives on the Missouri Crisis breathe new life into this much-written about subject, and could not be more timely given our current-day grappling with the question of race and citizenship.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, author of On Juneteenth

“This book will reset the standard by which historians understand the Missouri Crisis, the politics of slavery, and the Early National era more broadly. The editors did an outstanding job of bringing together scholars who approach the topic from a variety of perspectives, and in doing so, not only re-center the Missouri Crisis historiographically, but offer compelling new lenses through which all historians will need to consider the political history of slavery and anti-slavery in the early United States.”— Ryan A. Quintana, Wellesley College, author of Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina

“Because the achievement of statehood by Missouri was tied to the expansion of slavery, its two hundredth anniversary is a problem for those who want their commemorations to be celebrations. But what makes Missouri’s admission a bad bicentennial for the state’s boosters makes for really good scholarship in A Fire Bell in the Past. These bold essays ring loud, awakening readers to how much this crisis mattered—and still matters.”—Stephen Aron, UCLA and Autry Museum of the American West, author of American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State

“Two centuries ago, the federal union barely survived the ramifying crises surrounding Missouri’s admission to the union. The fine essays in Pasley and Hammond’s splendid new collection constitutes the best kind of bicentennial commemoration, offering a broad array of provocative, timely, and deeply sobering reflections on this defining moment in American history.”—Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia, co-author of "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination

“A Fire Bell in the Past is a major achievement for Pasley, Hammond, and all the volume’s authors. They not only demonstrate the sweeping but sometimes unappreciated power of slavery to shape the nation’s founding and its subsequent history, but also open up striking new insights from an episode that seemed too familiar to teach us anything further.”—Missouri Historical Review