Papers by John Craig Hammond
A Continent in Crisis: The U.S. Civil War in North America, 2022
A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 2, The Missouri Question and Its Answers, 2021
In one oF the most intense rounds of our postmillennial culture wars, a recent battle raged over ... more In one oF the most intense rounds of our postmillennial culture wars, a recent battle raged over America's "founding" year, as different political factions wish to frame it. Beginning in 2019, the New York Times mounted "The 1619 Project, " pushing the U.S. founding date back to the moment when enslaved Africans were first introduced in Virginia. The choice of 1619 was a way of making the case that African slavery, anti-Black racism, and economic exploitation were the central features of the American experience. These were worthwhile points to make, even if some details are questionable and the resulting history a bit tendentious and telescoped. Primarily an ambitious piece of cultural entrepreneurship and "Year of Decision"-style popular history branding rather than a radical new interpretation, 1619 came with an elaborate program of videos, interactive graphics, social media posts, and, most controversially, educational materials to go with the core articles. With prominent exceptions, it received impressive backing from elite cultural institutions. Most professional historians appreciated the packaging and dissemination of recent scholarship on race and slavery. The project also provided ready-made fodder for the right-wing outrage machine, another stanza in its litany of "woke" crimes against America. 1 Almost a year after the series started, but just a few weeks after the George Floyd protests began in Minneapolis, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas complained that 1619 depicted the United States as, "at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. " He then introduced a bill banning federal funds from being used to teach the 1619 Project in public schools. The Trump administration followed up with a midcampaign White House History Conference and a "1776 Commission. " While Trump's 1776 Commission included no historians, it did provide a throaty defense of the traditional date and self-consciously promoted "patriotic education. " Two
A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 1, Western Slavery, National Impasse,, 2021
Missouri Historical Review , 2021
In 1793, French merchant Mathurin-Michel Amoureux f led counterrevolutionaries in Lorient, France... more In 1793, French merchant Mathurin-Michel Amoureux f led counterrevolutionaries in Lorient, France; by 1801, he had made his way to New Madrid in French Louisiana. There he settled among the habitants of the Middle Mississippi valley. Around the same time that Amoureux arrived in New Madrid, so did word of the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800), whereby Spain ceded its claims of sovereignty over the vast Louisiana Country to France. Unaware of negotiations in Paris that would result in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Amoureux eagerly anticipated French dominion over a new Mississippi valley empire. Deeply knowledgeable about the region, he penned a detailed description on August 4, 1803, of New Madrid and its potential place in a burgeoning French North American empire. 1 Amoureux's immediate goal in writing his letter was to convince French Louisiana's unnamed governor to confirm New Madrid, rather than St. Louis, as capital of the district of Upper Louisiana. Joining his own interests to that of an incipient French empire, the educated and ambitious Amoureux also stated his "desire to be useful to the public business," an indirect request for appoint
American Nineteenth Century History, 2021
In the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War, sectional conflict frequently took place in overlapp... more In the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War, sectional conflict frequently took place in overlapping continental, hemispheric, Atlantic, and international contexts. Within these broader geographies, northern and southern whites used conceptions of empire to construct a hemispheric, Manichean struggle pitting free labour versus slave labour, democracy against aristocracy and monarchy, and popular sovereignty versus slaveholder sovereignty and the Slave Power. Beginning in the 1840s, and deepening in the 1850s, southern whites forged an imperial ideology which called for the creation of a vast empire for slavery in the Americas. Responding directly to the rise of southern proslavery imperialism, northern whites created an imperial ideology based on democratic-republican forms of government and free labour. By the late 1850s, Democratic and Republican imperialists advocated the imposition of their particular forms of sovereignty, race, labour, and republican government onto their sectional rivals as well as onto borderland regions in the trans-Mississippi West, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. In the 1850s the United States became an empire increasingly divided by antagonistic imperial visions for the broader Americas; by 1860, Democrats and Republicans had become de facto imperial rivals.
Reviews in History , 2019
“President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Politics of Slavery,” Journal of American History, 105 (March 2019), 843 – 867
Historians have long sought to assess the role of President James Monroe in forging and then nego... more 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
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Special Issue, “Illinois History—A Bicentennial Appraisal,” 111 (Spring/Summer 2018), 31 – 54
The Routledge History of Nineteenth Century America, 2017
Journal of the Civil War Era , 2014
Journal of The Early Republic, 2012
Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Freedom and Bondage in the New American Nation, 2011
Journal of the Early Republic , 2003
Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 2003
Journal of the Early Republic , 2008
Journal of Social History, 2011
... Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ford, Lacy K. Deliver us from evil : the s... more ... Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ford, Lacy K. Deliver us from evil : the slavery question in the old south / Lacy K. Ford. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ... Page 7. for janet, travis, and sonya Page 8. This page intentionally left blank Page 9. ...
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Papers by John Craig Hammond