The panic of 1819 and the debate over the presence of slavery in Missouri shattered the illusion that America could exist without political factions or parties. But did the Missouri Compromise put the United States on the road to war?

Join Poplar Forest and Dr. Adam W. Dean, an associate professor of history at the University of Lynchburg specializing in slavery, the American Civil War and Reconstruction, for an exploration of the origins and aftermath of the debate over slavery in the Louisiana Purchase. Dr. Dean will suggest that while the Missouri Compromise showed the potential for sectional divisions on slavery, it did not mean that the Civil War was inevitable.

Dr. Dean, who earned his PhD in 19th-century United States history from the University of Virginia in 2010, will focus on using insights from environmental and social history to answer long-standing questions about the Civil War. His first book, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. Dr. Dean has published articles in Civil War History and The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

About the Missouri Compromise

In 1820, Congress made an effort to ease tensions between the slave and free states by passing the Missouri Compromise, which permitted Missouri’s request to join the Union as a slave state, admitted Maine as a free state to maintain numerical balance between slave and free states and set a physical boundary between the free and slave regions of the country. Bitter debates and anxieties ensued across the country and here in Virginia, where slave owners and enslaved individuals alike pondered how the compromise might affect their futures.