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John Craig Hammond, President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Politics of Slavery, Journal of American History, Volume 105, Issue 4, March 2019, Pages 843–867, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz002
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Extract
Historians have long sought to assess the role of President James Monroe in forging and then negotiating the passage of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Their assessments have been written within a historiographical tradition that praises statesmanship over sectionalism, celebrates southern statesmen's invocations of union and nationalism, and elevates compromise to the loftiest of American political values. Within that historiographical paradigm, interpretations of the politics of slavery focus on how sectional extremists exploited the fragility of the Union for their own purposes, and how moderate unionist statesmen intervened to save the Union from sectionalists. In turn, much historical writing seeks to identify sectional threats to union, castigate disunionists, and then celebrate how unionists won in every sectional crisis from the 1770s through the late 1850s, or explain how disunionists triumphed in 1860–1861. Overlapping spectrums of union and disunion, slavery and antislavery, statesmen and sectionalists form a metanarrative that provides an outline for most writing on slavery and politics from the American Revolution through the Civil War. In the broader scholarly literature on the politics of slavery, disunionism and narrow sectionalism are cardinal sins; unionism and nationalism are virtues.1
