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Chapter VI - The Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise 1819 - 1821
The issues of sectionalism and slavery, dormant since the closing of African slave trade in 1808, reawakened in 1819. By 1819 the United States had an equal number of slave and free states, eleven each. However, the opening up of the Louisiana Territory after the War of 1812 threatened this delicate balance.
In February Missouri petitioned the House of Representatives for permission to draft a state constitution and enter the Union. James Tallmedge, Jr. of New York also introduced a resolution prohibiting the further introduction of slaves into Missouri and providing freedom at age twenty-five for those born after the territory's admission as a state. After heated debates the House passed this amendment while the Senate rejected it. Writing to an antislavery friend, Jefferson, a slave holder himself, called the Missouri question:
a fireball in the night, which awakened and filled me with terror I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It might be put to rest for a time. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence . . . . we have the wolf by the ears and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale and self-preservation is in the other.
Smoldering antislavery sentiment in the North ignited over the Missouri issue. In the South, however, outrage and indignation blazed when citizens hiding behind the cloak of the Fifth Amendment claimed that slave holders could not be denied the right to carry their property into the territory since this would be deprivation of property without due process of law. Northerners in opposition countered that Congress was empowered to forbid slavery in Missouri just as the Confederation Congress had done in the Northwest Territory.
Debate raged over the Missouri issue when Congress met in December of 1819. Fortunately Maine's application for statehood tempered the debates somewhat. Even if Missouri became a slave state, the ratio of slave to free states would be balanced by allowing Maine, a free states to enter the Union. House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky finally hammered out a compromise after days of intense arguing. Maine would be admitted as a free state and Missouri allowed into the Union as a slave state. Slavery would be excluded from the rest of the Louisiana Territory north of Missouri's southern border. Since many politicians considered the remaining territory desert and unprofitable for slave holders' use, the compromise was widely hailed as a success. On August 10, 1821, President Monroe proclaimed the admission of Missouri as the twenty-fourth state.
Even so, the Missouri Compromise failed to appease many dissatisfied Southerners and Northerners. Congressmen who voted for the bill were burned in effigy both in the North and South. Obviously a simple political compromise could not untangle the complex ethical knots of the slavery issue. After the compromises John Quincy Adams, warned:
Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union . . . . What can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend on the color of the skin . . . . If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break. For the present, however, this contest is laid asleep.
The uneasy slumber of this temporarily lulled specter was brief. Growing sectionalism and the issue of slavery would ultimately tear at the fiber of the Union itself. Yet in 1820 Americans could look back over the past twenty years with some pride. Between 1800 and 1820 the United States doubled in size, defeated Britain for the second time and crafted a political compromise which insured continued territorial and economic expansion for the growing republic. But territorial and economic expansion were overshadowed by the dark image of men, women and children in chains, an image that would continuously haunt America between 1820 and 1860.
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