Contesting Slavery

Over the last two decades, scholarship on the relationship between slavery and U.S. politics has moved decisively away from the four decades before the Civil War. The current focus has turned to the forty years between the decision of the Massachusetts State Supreme Judicial Court in the matter of Quock Walker (a series of cases that successfully challenged the legality of slavery in Massachusetts in the 1780s) and the completion of the Missouri Compromise in 1820. This collection does an excellent job of assembling some of the top historians working on those decades. Including the introduction cowritten by John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason, and a concluding comment by James Oakes, there are fifteen essays in the collection. Their number precludes individual review of each, but the editors have collated them into three sections. The first is “Slavery and Ideology, Action and Inaction.” These five essays provide explanations for a “why the dog stopped barking” question: the authors examine the inability of the first generation of American citizens to translate antislavery sentiment into action. Notable here is Mason's overview, which concludes that northern antislavery sentiment acquired weight in political calculations only when slavery and its expansion impinged on free-state economic interests

Action (physics · Compromise · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Principle of legality · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science · Supreme court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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