Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 ed. by William S. Belko, and: A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200. Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 ed. by William S. Belko, and: A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200. Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond Stuart Leibiger Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821. Edited by William S. Belko. Studies in Constitutional Democracy. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. x, 225. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-2228-2.) A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200. Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse. Edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond. Studies in Constitutional Democracy. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. xxvi, 414. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-2231-2.) Two new books in the University of Missouri Press series Studies in Constitutional Democracy mark the recent bicentennial of the Missouri Compromise. Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821, edited by William S. Belko, executive director of the Missouri Humanities Council, closely examines congressional debates over the settlement. A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse, edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley, a professor of history at the University of Missouri, and John Craig Hammond, an associate professor of history at Penn State University–New Kensington, explores the Missouri crisis in a context broader than the narrow congressional milieu in which it is usually studied. Between 1819 and 1821, a controversy over Missouri's admission to the Union deadlocked Congress. Antislavery restrictionists in the House of Representatives passed the Tallmadge Amendment, prohibiting Missouri's admission as a slave state, but proslavery antirestrictionists blocked the measure in the Senate. After a one-year deadlock, Congress admitted Missouri as a slave state. The settlement also provided that the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′ would be forever free of slavery. Later in 1820, controversy resurfaced when a clause in Missouri's state constitution banned free people of color from entering the state. A congressional resolution stating that the clause in question could not be used to violate the privileges and immunities clause of the federal Constitution resolved this second dispute, despite Missouri's continued refusal to admit free Black people. Each chapter of Contesting the Constitution perceptively analyzes how a specific clause in the U.S. Constitution was interpreted by restrictionists and antirestrictionists in the congressional debates over Missouri's bid for statehood. Christopher Childers's essay discusses how Missouri's ban on free Black people entering the state sparked a disagreement over the meaning of the privileges and immunities clause. Restrictionists argued that by denying free citizens of color access to the state, Missouri's constitution violated the clause in Article IV, Section 2, that states that "citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states" (Belko, p. 31). Antirestrictionists countered that Missouri's constitution did not violate the federal Constitution because Black people were not in fact U.S. citizens. A chapter by John Eastman (who supported Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election) examines the debate over the guarantee clause. Restrictionists insisted that Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution, which guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government," required Congress to deny Missouri's admission to the Union as a [End Page 763] slave state, because slavery clearly violated the principles of republicanism (Belko, p. 51). Antirestrictionists answered that the treaty between the United States and France creating the Louisiana Territory ensured that new states carved out of that territory must enter the Union on the same terms as the original states, including the option to have slavery. Chapter 8, one of three chapters by William S. Belko, illustrates how restrictionists refuted this claim by maintaining that the president and the Senate could not use a treaty to usurp the power of Congress to regulate the territories and admit new states. As John R. Van Atta's essay demonstrates, southern states vigorously denied that Congress possessed the power to prohibit slavery in new states (as opposed to in...