Product details
- ISBN 9780826223654
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 17 Nov 2026
- Publisher: University of Missouri Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In this engaging new work, Terrell Dempsey and Patrick Hotle draw from newly discovered and underutilized primary sources to craft a detailed narrative history of the rise of a group of radical abolitionists in Quincy, Illinois, and the outsized, if mostly overlooked, influence they had on the dissolution of the Union.
The story begins with the 1830 arrival in Marion County, Missouri, of Dr. David Nelson, a Presbyterian minister and supporter of the American Colonization Society. After hearing a speech by Theodore B. Weld, Nelson was converted to the abolitionist cause and went on to recruit Elijah Lovejoy into the region’s nascent anti-slavery movement. Nelson’s activities resulted in the creation of an active anti-abolitionist organization in Northeast Missouri that ended up running him out of the state and across the river to Quincy, Illinois, at the same time Lovejoy sought shelter in Alton, Illinois.
In Quincy, Nelson and a group of like-minded moderate anti-slavery activists opened a manual labor school called the Mission Institute. Following the murder of Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob, a small band of abolitionists at the Mission Institute became radicalized and decided to aid enslaved people in their quest for freedom. After three of these abolitionists were captured in Missouri and sentenced to twelve years in prison, others at the Mission Institute published a call for the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society to organize an underground railroad in Illinois. The Society officially committed to assisting enslaved people to escape slavery in May of 1842, which triggered a hostile reaction from enslavers in Missouri who went on to organize patrols, seek stricter state laws, and attempt to sabotage the underground railroad in neighboring Illinois.
In Breaking America, Dempsey and Hotle demonstrate the impact of the Quincy abolitionists on the later Dred Scott cases. The authors trace a sequence of revivals, public meetings, daring escapes, over-reactions, judicial decisions, and violence, providing a roadmap for how Missouri judicial opinion changed from “once free, always free” to “once a slave, always a slave” under Missouri Law. Breaking America is an important new addition to the history of abolitionism, the Dred Scott decision, and the eventual dissolution of the Union.
Terrell Dempsey is an independent scholar and attorney and partner with the firm Dempsey, Dempsey, and Moellring, in Hannibal, Missouri. He received his B.A. from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1976, and his J.D. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1987. He is the author of Searching for Jim, Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World (University of Missouri Press, 2003).
Patrick Hotle is Professor Emeritus of History at Culver-Stockton College. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Iowa, his Master of Philosophy in international relations, and his PhD in history from Cambridge University in England. Hotle has received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the President’s Award for Exemplary Service. He has authored books on the Renaissance, Egypt and the Middle East, and Russia.
