A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond (review)

Abstract

and to stymie abolitionist writers. White writers used euphemisms or communicated “in code” (190) in their private correspondence. With this dearth of immediate primary materials, postbellum archivists did not attempt to collect materials about an event they did not know of. Without these materials and with a white historical profession that was already convinced of slave docility, the story of Nicholas was effectively silenced. So, in writing All for Liberty, Jeff Strickland unsilences the past—to borrow Trouillot’s language.2 Luckily for the reader, he has done so with prose that is as accessible for general audiences, including undergraduates, as it is enlightening for seasoned scholars of antebellum slavery.