The Richards Center will host our first community manuscript workshop this semester featuring John Craig Hammond. Hammond is currently professor of history at Penn State New Kensington, and he will be joining the history faculty at University Park in fall 2027. His research focuses on empire, enslavement, and emancipation in North America between 1750 and 1860, and on the politics of slavery in the United States between 1770 and 1830. His most recent work is The Centrality of Slavery: Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).

The group will be workshopping, “Slaveholders, Speculators, and A Farmer of St. Charles County: George Churchill’s Missouri and Illinois Crises, 1818–1824,” which is currently under review with a scholarly journal. “Slaveholders, Speculators, and a Farmer” uses the writings and experiences of farmer and printer George Churchill to examine conflicts over slavery in Illinois and Missouri between 1818 and 1824. More specifically, it examines how Churchill arrived at his antislavery convictions in Missouri. It then examines how Churchill built an antislavery political coalition in Illinois in 1818 during the run-up to the state constitutional convention. It then shows how Churchill shifted his attention to slavery and statehood in Missouri, contrasting Churchill’s popular antislavery politics with the kinds of pro-slavery politics forged by small enslavers and speculators in Missouri. It concludes by focusing on the ways in which Churchill and others shifted their focus to defeating efforts to open Illinois to slavery between 1820 and 1824. It argues that Churchill’s experiences allow historians to understand how and why the Illinois and Missouri Crisis produced such different outcomes. In addition, Churchill’s actions illustrate how ordinary opponents of slavery fashioned effective antislavery political coalitions. At the same time, Churchill’s failures to spark a popular antislavery movement in Missouri demonstrates how ordinary enslavers blunted popular antislavery movements, and then forged their own pro-slavery political coalitions in Missouri.