The Trump Administration's white supremacist propaganda pamphlet The 1776 Project argues for an idealized view of American history that takes the span of US history as primarily an inspirational example of the development of the Exceptional America of the contemporary conservative Republican imagination.
Actual history, of course, is at least as complicated as the people who made it. Treating American history as some kind of sacred canon of wisdom and justice mainly leaves people open to dishonest and malicious versions of history like that promoted by The 1776 Project. The result of that kind of attitude was explained decades ago in this Tom Paxton song, performed here by Pete Seeger, What Did You Learn In School Today?:
On the other hand, there are things to be learned from history. How well we learn them is questionable. How we apply them often more so. It would be wrong and even silly to suggest that some "woke" interpretations of history that adopt a kind of mirror-image view have been as damaging as the triumphalist view has been and still is: Though it is also true that taking a kind of fundamental-opposition view of history in the mood of "it's-sin-and-we're-agin'-it" is also not very helpful in understanding history. Although it's sometimes convenient as a momentary polemic.
Certainly, in the case of the US, we are still living under the basic governmental form of the Constitution of 1789. So laws and court decisions going back to 1820 and before are relevant and often still binding. American society of today and the major changes in the Constitution is the product of historical developments since then, so we can still see and understood aspects of situations in 1820 in terms of our present experiences.
Hammond's essay is about one of the major inflection points in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) fight over slavery, the Missouri Compromise of 1820. I posted about Thomas Jefferson's position on that event in the third iteration of my annual Confederate "Heritage" Month cycle in 2006. That post discussed one of the events that seem so alien to us in retrospect, the pro-British sentiment in the Federalist Party during the War of 1812, which even included threats of secession on the part of some Northerners.
The Federalist Party had been in decline since 1801 and was practically dormant by 1817. But many of the politicians and political inclinations of that party were still active. And the experience with the Federalists during the war was still very much on President James Monroe's mind in 1819-20.
It's also more than a little strange to remember how important the planter class in the state of Virginia was in national politics at the time. From 1791 to 1825, John Adams was the only President (1795-1801) who was not from Virginia. The country was obvious much smaller then, although the number of states had grown considerably westward from the original 13 states to 22. And the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had opened up a huge potential for American settlement west of the Mississippi River.
Since much of mainstream history today rightly recognizes the importance of slavery in modern history, we are more aware today of how of how drastically different our understanding of basic human rights is in the US today than prior to 1865. And thanks to the "postcolonial" perspective that increasingly influences academic history, we also now find it hard to avoid considering how pervasively the settler colonialism practiced by the European powers - and later by the US and the other newly independent states all over the Americas - against the native populations was largely taken to be unavoidable, desirable, and necessary by the European-descended citizens of those countries.
We see such considerations pop up in Hammond's account of the Missouri Compromise, which admitted the former territory of Missouri to the Union as a slave state, but also banned slavery in Louisiana Purchase territory north of a defined geographic line, the 36°30′ parallel, which ran along the south border of Missouri. Maine was also admitted as a free state at the same time, preserving was already and equal balance between slave and free states, which meant the two groups were equally represented in the Senate.
As in later such major compromises, the Missouri Compromise was a concession to the Slave Power, i.e., the ruling planter elite of the slave states.
Hammond does not mention in his article a key technological development that had radically changed the context in which slavery was understood in the US, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793 (patented 1794), which drastically increased the profitability of cotton farming, which was done on a grand scale on the Southern slave plantations.
William Freehling has written valuable accounts of how slavery ended in the Northern states through "diffusion," as the proportion of slaves in those states grew smaller and the Southern plantation economies came to rely more heavily on slavery. This made "gradual emancipation" and/or compensated emancipation seem like a plausible way to end slavery, because that's how it had ended in the Northern states. And in the early years of the Republic, pro-slavery ideology tended to talk about slavery as a tragic but necessary evil that would and should disappear one day. It was a cynical ideology, no doubt. But the diffusion experience of the Northern states gave it some practical plausibility. (One of the effects that Freehling notes is that Northern whites in that process came to associate ending slavery with a decreased presence of black people, which is one way that hatred of slavery coexisted in the minds of many whites with hatred of black people as such.)
But the increasing viability of slavery went along with the development of a more explicit racist theory regarding blacks as inherently inferior to whites and by nature suited for slavery. If genes had been discovered yet, we could describe it as a genetic argument. But it was definitely pseudoscientific racism, even by the scientific standards o the time.
Though the "necessary evil" argument for slavery as something required to raise the black race to an acceptable state of civilization remained common among slavery defenders in Virginia up until the Civil War, Hammond notes that strong shift in the explicit position of even many Virginia planters to a more hardcore defense of the institution of slavery by the crisis that produced the Compromise of 1820. "The Missouri Crisis pushed Monroe and the Virginia planter class to accept a position they had long been moving toward: slavery in Virginia and the United States as a permanent institution."
Monroe himself was a slaveowner, like Washington and Jefferson and Madison were. "Although Monroe might have deprecated slavery’s existence and continuation in Virginia, like so many slaveholders he was financially dependent on his slaves, while his holdings in land and slaves solidified his family’s social status," writes Hammond. In his 2019 article, Hammond judged, "Monroe might have been a moderate, a unionist, and a nationalist on matters such as a national bank, but regarding slavery Monroe was as protective of the institution as the most radical Virginia planters." IN the 2021 essay, he presents Monroe's position in the moment as heavily tilting toward slavery, even beyond his considerable personal financial stake in the Peculiar Institution:
Historians typically take Monroe’s late support for the line as demonstration of his commitment to union and compromise. But Monroe’s actions during the Missouri Crisis were driven by his underlying concern for maintaining the planter class’s sovereignty over slavery as an institution, mastery over the lives of slaves, and Virginia’s preeminent place in the union. Monroe signed the Compromise into law in March 1820 because he feared that allowing the Missouri Crisis to continue promised a host of calamities far worse than a ban on slavery north of the 36–30 line.Hammond explains that the two perceived potential calamities were (1) a complete ban on slavery, and (2) threat of secession by Northern states, which in turn would produce Southern secession. He also notes, "In the midst of the Missouri Compromise, he took an active part in selling slaves and his landholdings." Whether than was just routine business on Monroe's part or a sign of declining optimism about the survival of slavery would be an interesting question.
Hammond's 2021 essay provides a good sense of how intensely the tensions between the free states and slave states were becoming in 1820 compared to previous times.
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