Jamelle Bouie: What do we do when everything is coming apart?

If you’ll bear with me for a moment, I want to talk a little about the Missouri controversy of 1819 to 1821.On its surface, it was a struggle over the sectional balance of slave and free states. Would Congress admit Missouri without restrictions on slavery, or would it outlaw the institution in the territory as a condition of statehood?But there was a deeper dispute at work, over the nature of the American union itself. “In one conception,” historian George William Van Cleve wr