| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 104.1

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 104.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Slavery and Politics in the Early Republic

By Matthew Mason

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 339. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00.)

The debates over slavery appear in U. S. history textbooks and survey courses at a few selected points. The founders bickered about the peculiar institution during the Constitutional Convention, laying down markers that would frame debates for generations, but after 1790 those issues were safely swept under the rug. In 1819 slavery briefly returned to politics with the debates over the Missouri Compromise, but the issue really did not enter national political discourse until the 1830s, and the sectional crisis emerged as a serious threat only in the 1850s. Or so the story goes.

In this deeply researched monograph, Matthew Mason challenges conventional wisdom by shifting our gaze from the immediate antebellum years to the first decades of the Early Republic. Through a close reading of political speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper editorials, Mason demonstrates that slavery never disappeared from public discussions. Politicians on both sides of the political aisle routinely found ways to use the peculiar institution to their advantage. In the early nineteenth century, national and international debates about slavery shaped regional differences between the North and the South (and within the North), while also becoming a crucial aspect of Anglo-American dialogue.

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