RUFUS KING AND THE MISSOURI QUESTION: A STUDY IN POLITICAL MYTHOLOGY
At the beginning of the year, 1819, Americans were congratulating themselves on the fact that their young nation had weathered the fierce storms of domestic controversy and foreign danger which had seemed to threaten the survival of the republic ever since its birth. But, when that year ended, the nation's statesmen were engaged in such a violent debate over the future of slavery in the west that there were dire warnings and gloomy prophecies to be heard everywhere. Men were discussing the probability of the imminent dissolution of the union or, even worse, of a terrible blood bath during some future insurrection of slaves. Later generations, too, have viewed this episode as a conflict fraught with great significance. Both its violent tone and its major theme seemed to anticipate similar quarrels which were to shake the nation to its foundations a generation later. The writer of every standard textbook in United States history has felt himself obliged to assign it a page, so that dutiful undergraduates might memorize the occasion of the crisis, its dates, and the terms of the compromise which ended it Yet the question remains, why did the debate over slavery arise so suddenly, expand so fiercely, and then disappear so completely, like the brief, wild fury of a summer thunderstorm? Why did it arise at this particular time, and why was the question of Missouri's admission as a state the cause of the argument? Traditionally, the controversy has been explained as an attempt to preserve a balance between the slave and the free states; but sectional units, thus defined, did not emerge until the Missouri debates had begun. At the time of the dispute, the belief became widespread that it was the result of a Federalist-Clintonian conspiracy to capture the White House. Homer C. Hockett has weighed the evidence and concluded that the belief that Rufus King and DeWitt Clinton conspired to produce this crisis was merely a popular misconception. More recently, Glover Moore made an elaborate study of the crisis in which he gave a qualified endorsement to the rumor. Can the Missouri question be explained as a manifestation of the petty power lust of an ageing Rufus King and an unscrupulous DeWitt Clinton? Did such a scheme cause Congress to draw that geographical line between freedom and slavery which led toward such fatal consequences? Or, was this merely a groundless political myth, whether the result of an honest misinterpretation or of a deliberate smear? If the Missouri question was not the result of a political conspiracy, what was its true origin? How did the name of Rufus King become so prominently attached to the quarrel? This study will examine these questions.
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