Wolf by the Ears: The Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 by John R. Van Atta

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wolf by the Ears: The Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821by John R. Van Atta Matthew H. Crocker Wolf by the Ears: The Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821. By John R. Van Atta. Witness to History. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 199. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-1653-3; cloth, $50.00, ISBN 978-1-4214-1652-6.) Following the precedent established by Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the territory of Missouri in 1819 petitioned Congress to become a slaveholding state without a second thought. There seemed little question that slavery would continue in the district once statehood was achieved. Indeed, the Louisiana Purchase treaty had guaranteed slavery’s legality in the territory, and by 1819 Missouri’s slave population had surpassed ten thousand. When New York congressman James Tallmadge presented an amendment to the Missouri statehood bill that would abolish slavery over the course of a few years, the southern delegation in Congress rebelled, beginning a three-year political battle that, according to John R. Van Atta, led to “a convergenceof political, economic, and social disturbances—West, South, and North—that brought an end to the old order of American life and suggested the broad outlines of a new one” (p. 4). A united South vigorously came to Missouri’s defense to secure slavery’s place in the republic, articulating a new and powerful rhetorical stance that anticipated the proslavery, “positive good” rationale of the future. In reaction, antislavery northerners saw slavery’s expansion coupled with its latest brazen defense as a threat to an emerging market economy in the North that was shedding its dependence on unfree labor for a free labor force of wage earners. Just as southerners during the crisis embraced a new ideology in slavery’s defense, northerners proceeded to form their own innovative canon based on free labor principles. The result in Congress, as well as in the country at large, was, according to Van Atta, “a widening cultural gulf between North and South . . . . [that] resulted in widespread anxiety that the country might split into not two, but three (or more) separate, distinct, and rival political entities—in the West, the South, and the North” (p. 89). In making his case, Van Atta adds to the historiography of the Missouri controversy by expanding his study beyond the halls of Congress and on to Main Street. We learn not only about the backgrounds and positions taken by some of the major players in the debates, such as James Tallmadge, Henry Clay, and brothers James and Philip P. Barbour, but also about how contrasting communities as diverse as Manhattan, New York, and Boon’s Lick, Missouri, reacted to the crisis. Van Atta also provides a comprehensive overview of the compromise worked out by Henry Clay, which Van Atta characterizes as “making sense at thattime” (p. 4). But, as he traces events, [End Page 919]what made sense in 1820 increasingly did not over the course of the next forty years as the “ convergenceof political, economic, and social disturbances” became too volatile for the political realm to handle. John R. Van Atta has written a fine synthesis on the Missouri crisis that incorporates some of the best scholarship in the field. It serves as a wonderful introduction to the subject. Matthew H. Crocker Keene State College Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association