| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West. By John Craig Hammond. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. xiv, 245 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-2669-8.)

Why did the young American republic, committed as it was to freedom and equality, fail to outlaw slavery in its western territories? John Craig Hammond addresses this perennial question in his well-written, carefully argued book. As he documents, Republicans no less than Federalists in Congress made several attempts to restrict slavery in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri territories. They often defeated proslavery adherents in debate, but acceded to their own countervailing desire to win the allegiance of white westerners for the United States. Hammond downplays the argument, made by William Freehling, that leaders such as Thomas Jefferson failed to act. Instead, he stresses that inhabitants of the Southwest used threats of "British, Spanish, and French intrigues" to bait Congress while arguing that they needed slavery to prosper (p. 41). Later efforts to limit slavery during the Missouri Compromise failed because a newly emboldened West demanded popular sovereignty, and the South, grown rich on slave profits, had become addicted to the domestic slave trade.

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