| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Matthew Mason. Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 339. $45.00.

Matthew Mason wants to refocus political debates during the early republic through the lens of slavery. In this book, he shows how debates over such seemingly tangential issues as the relief efforts that followed a devastating city-wide fire in Savannah, Georgia, in 1820 provoked sectional rancor, which, in turn, lead to attacks on and defenses of slavery (pp. 1–2). He also shows how the language of the antebellum debates over slavery mirrored these earlier debates, in which the participants on both sides relied on standard repertoires that had been developed during the years between the enactment of the slave-trade ban and the Missouri Compromise (p. 237). Mason would then have us look at the whole 1808–1861 period seamlessly, as a period where the fate of American slavery was continually debated, rather than disjointedly, as a series of crises over the institution that defined critical junctures between times of relative quiescence.

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