Missouri Compromise 1820

6 Key excerpts on "Missouri Compromise 1820"

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  Commonwealth of Compromise

  Civil War Commemoration in Missouri

  • Amy Laurel Fluker(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of Missouri

    (Publisher)

  12 Missouri’s slaveholders were certainly not any less adept at exerting violent control over enslaved people than their southern neighbors. From its earliest territorial history, Missouri’s slave codes defined enslaved people as chattel and denied them essential human and civil rights. White Missourians considered white supremacy and slavery as crucial to the development of their state and, thereby, the continued expansion of the nation. Racism and republicanism were not contradictions to them, even though those positions became increasingly difficult to reconcile as the nineteenth century wore on.

  One of the moments where this contradiction first became evident was in the controversy over Missouri’s application for statehood in 1819–1820. Missouri’s proslavery constitution jeopardized the tenuous balance of power between free and slave states in Congress and threatened a national crisis over slaveholding in the republic. In Congress, various proposals sought to limit slavery in Missouri’s statehood bill and even created programs for gradual emancipation. White Missourians resented the sectional bickering in Congress that delayed their statehood. They wanted their state to be admitted without restriction and on equal terms with every other one. After extensive debate, Congress finally arrived at the Missouri Compromise in 1820, a deal that admitted Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state but prohibited the formation of new slave states in the Louisiana Territory north of Missouri’s southern border at the latitude of 36° 30’. Although the compromise ultimately proved only a temporary solution, it was a momentous occasion—one that heralded doom in the minds of slaveholders and put Missouri at the center of the national dilemma over slavery. Missouri’s admission to the Union set an important precedent for the future of slave-holding in the United States and established a tradition of compromise in Missouri politics. This would later manifest itself through a pervasive strain of conservative Unionism. As the antebellum era wore on, white Missourians increasingly adopted a responsibility for tempering sectional ambitions and channeling them into a beneficial direction for the nation.

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  Encyclopedia of African American History

  [3 volumes]

  • Leslie M. Alexander, Walter C. Rucker, Leslie M. Alexander, Walter C. Rucker(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  In other words, there must be the same number of free and slave states. In 1819, Alabama was admitted into the Union as a slave state, thus equal- izing the proportion of free and slave states, at 11 free and slave states. The admission of Missouri as a slave state would offset the balance in the Congress. When Congress was dismissed in late 1819, the crisis still had not been re- solved in toto. When Congress reconvened in 1820, an opportunity emerged that would resolve the crisis. With the issue of Missouri lingering, the territory of Maine was prepared for admission into the Union. On January 3, 1820, the terri- tory of Maine, which originated as the northern province of Massachusetts, passed an admissions bill. In 1820, there were two disconnected admission bills on the table: Mis- souri and Maine. After heated debate, the Congress, led by Henry Clay as well as Jesse B. Thomas, connected the two admission bills in what has become known as the Missouri Compromise. Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, the issue of admission and slavery were enjoined under one bill. First, the territory of Missouri was admitted as a slave state (or at least with no federal requirements regarding slavery). Second, the territory of Maine was admitted as a free state. In a controversial aspect of the compromise, the Louisiana territory was essentially divided at the 36°30' line. In the future, the status, free or slave, of any territory that applied for admission into the Union would be de- termined by the latitude line. A territory that was north of the line must be admitted as free, and a territory south of the line can be admitted as slave. The 36°30' line estab- lished a demarcation cord between the free North and the slave South. After the passage of the compromise, politicians and citizens on both sides believed that peace had been achieved. In the long term, it established a dividing line within the national consciousness.

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  A Slaveholders' Union

  Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic

  • George William Van Cleve(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  25 The challenge to its ad-mission led by Representative James Tallmadge, Jr., of New York, who argued that the state constitution unduly protected slavery, nevertheless lost overwhelmingly. Only 20 percent of the House, or one-third of the t h e m i s s o u r i c o m p a c t a n d t h e r u l e o f l a w 231 members from New England and Middle Atlantic states, supported Tall-madge’s proposal. 26 S E C T I O N A L E C O N O M I C I N T E R E S T S I N W E S T E R N E X P A N S I O N The Missouri controversy began with a sharp preliminary skirmish during February 1819 debate over amendments offered by Representatives Tall-madge and John W. Taylor of New York to phase out slavery in Missouri and Arkansas by barring the future importation of slaves and requiring gradual abolition there. The two-year debate that ensued changed few if any minds among legislators, but it was an extraordinarily important de-bate nevertheless. The controversy unfolded under intense newspaper and public scrutiny, which meant that congressmen believed that they had to justify their positions to their constituents. The controversy was the first truly “popular” American national debate over slavery. Many congressmen believed that the Missouri bill would set an enor-mously important precedent. Senator Jonathan Roberts of Pennsylvania said: “There is no ground on which slavery can be extended in Missouri, that will not apply to the whole region west of the Mississippi.” 27 But if the Missouri debate was a “referendum on the meaning of America,” it is essential to know precisely what was at stake there in order to understand its results. 28 The political configuration on slavery restriction that had existed as late as the debate over Illinois at the end of 1818 changed dramatically when Representative Tallmadge offered his slavery restriction proposal during consideration of Missouri’s statehood request in early 1819.

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  Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s

  • Paul Finkelman, Donald R. Kennon(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Ohio University Press

    (Publisher)

  The territorial accom -modation did not satisfy the South, but only whetted slaveholders’ appetite for more land. In 1850 the southerners, with the aid of Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, had undermined the Missouri Compromise line. In 1854 Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise line for most of the existing western territories. This was the logical extension of the 1850 compromise. The doughface president Franklin Pierce dutifully signed the law, making slavery legal in all the federal territo -ries except Minnesota and Oregon (which included present-day Washington and parts of Idaho). Slavery was now legal everywhere else in the West. What followed was Bleeding Kansas and the failure of the Pierce and Buchanan administrations to oversee peaceful settlement or fair and democratic elec-tions in Kansas. In 1857 the Supreme Court W nished this task in the Dred Scott case, by striking down the ban on slavery in the Missouri Compromise, and further holding that Congress could never ban slavery in the territories. It is impos-sible to know if the legislation of 1850 and 1854 emboldened Chief Justice Taney to reach such an extreme result, but this seems likely. This was only the second time the Court had ever found an act of Congress unconstitutional. Striking down an act of Congress seemed counter to Taney’s Jacksonian jurisprudence, but in light of the legislation of 1850 and 1854 the result was consistent with Taney’s general deference to Congress. The Appeasement of 1850 73 Thus the compromise passed in 1850 led to a total collapse of the idea of free soil in America. At the beginning of 1850 slavery was banned from almost all the federal territories. Congress had not yet acted on the status of slavery in the newly acquired lands of the Southwest, so presumably Mexican law still applied, which made slavery illegal there. 53 In almost all of the rest of the West slavery was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise.

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  The Enduring Vision

  A History of the American People, Volume 1: To 1877

  • Paul Boyer, Clifford Clark, Karen Halttunen, Joseph Kett(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  war with Mexico ended in 1848, the United States contained an equal number of free and slave states (fifteen each), but the vast territory acquired by the war threatened to upset this balance. Any solution to the question of slavery in the Mexican cession ensured controversy. The doctrine of free soil , which insisted that Congress prohibit slavery in the territories, horrified southerners. The idea of extending the Missouri Compromise line of 36 8 30' to the Pacific made no one happy: it angered free-soilers because it would allow slavery in New Mexico and southern California, and it infuriated southern proslavery extremists because it conceded that Congress could bar slavery in some territories. A third solution, popular sovereignty , which prom-ised to ease the slavery extension issue out of national politics by allowing each territory to decide the matter for itself, pleased nei-ther free-soilers nor proslavery extremists. As the rhetoric escalated, events plunged the nation into crisis. Utah and then California, both acquired from Mexico, sought admission to the Union as free states. Texas, admitted as a slave state in 1845, aggravated matters by claiming the eastern half of New Mexico, where the Mexican government had abol-ished slavery. By 1850, these territorial issues had become intertwined with two other concerns. Northerners increasingly free soil The doctrine that insisted that Congress prohibit slavery in the territories. popular sovereignty Promised to ease the slavery extension issue out of national politics by allowing each territory to decide the question of slavery for itself. attacked slavery in the District of Columbia, within the shadow of the Capitol; southerners complained about lax enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Any broad compromise would have to take both trouble-some matters into account.

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  Prologue to Conflict

  The Crisis and Compromise of 1850

  • Holman Hamilton(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  Douglas, however, thought them identical. He also believed that the Missouri Compromise was inconsistent with the principle of non-interyention recognized by the Compromise of 1850 and thus was inoperative and void. 62 Actually, the chief distinction between pertinent parts of the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Law lay rather in the practical politics and the fervent emotions involved in the issue than in any legalistic differences. New Mexico and Utah had not been defined as free soil by the Missouri Compromise or any other American legislation. Therefore, the application of popular sovereignty to the problems of 1850 did not evoke the sectional turbulence so disruptive in 1854. The telling argument in 1854 was that land solemnly guaranteed to freedom might be lost to slavery. Accusations of an atrocious plot and a criminal betrayal, committed on the basis of meditated bad faith, convinced numerous Northerners and led tens of thousands of erstwhile moderates to abandon their moderation. 53 Though the Kansas-Nebraska question is not under scru-tiny here, it is important in viewing the Compromise of 1850 in connection with later events to note that Douglas, 50 Congressional Globe, 33 Cong., 1 Sess., 275-81. 51 Allen Johnson, The Genesis of Popular Sovereignty, Iowa Journal of History and Politics, III (Jan. 1905), 14, 18. 62 The Public Statutes at Large and Treaties of the United States of America (76 vols., Boston, 1845-1963), X, 283, 289. 83 Milton, The Eve of Conflict, 120-41; Washington National Era, January 24, 1854. The Compromise in Operation 183 its principal architect, stressed its prominence in the his-torical sequence. He did this again when he debated with Lincoln at Galesburg in 1858 and when he published an elaborate policy paper in Harpers Magazine in 1859.

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