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Missouri Compromise

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The United States in 1819 (the light orange and light green areas were not then part of the United States). The Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in the unorganized territory of the Great Plains (upper dark green) and permitted it in Missouri (yellow) and the Arkansas Territory (lower blue area).
Events leading to the American Civil War
  1. Northwest Ordinance
  2. Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions
  3. End of Atlantic slave trade
  4. Missouri Compromise
  5. Tariff of 1828
  6. Nat Turner's Rebellion
  7. Nullification crisis
  8. End of slavery in British colonies
  9. Texas Revolution
  10. United States v. Crandall
  11. Gag rule
  12. Commonwealth v. Aves
  13. Murder of Elijah Lovejoy
  14. Burning of Pennsylvania Hall
  15. American Slavery As It Is
  16. United States v. The Amistad
  17. Prigg v. Pennsylvania
  18. Texas annexation
  19. Mexican–American War
  20. Wilmot Proviso
  21. Nashville Convention
  22. Compromise of 1850
  23. Uncle Tom's Cabin
  24. Recapture of Anthony Burns
  25. Kansas–Nebraska Act
  26. Ostend Manifesto
  27. Bleeding Kansas
  28. Caning of Charles Sumner
  29. Dred Scott v. Sandford
  30. The Impending Crisis of the South
  31. Panic of 1857
  32. Lincoln–Douglas debates
  33. Oberlin–Wellington Rescue
  34. John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry
  35. Virginia v. John Brown
  36. 1860 presidential election
  37. Crittenden Compromise
  38. Secession of Southern states
  39. Peace Conference of 1861
  40. Corwin Amendment
  41. Battle of Fort Sumter

The Missouri Compromise was attained through legislation passed by the 16th Congress of the United States on May 8, 1820. The measures provided for the admission of the District of Maine as a free state and the Missouri territory without restriction on slavery. In addition, it outlawed slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel within the Louisiana Purchase lands, thereby committing the largest remaining portion of the territory to free-soil. South of the parallel no slavery restrictions were imposed. President James Monroe signed the legislation on April 6, 1820.[1]

The compromise bills served to quell the furious sectional debates that had first erupted during the final session of the 15th Congress. On February 3, 1819, Representative James Tallmadge, Jr., a Jeffersonian Republican from New York State, had submitted two amendments to Missouri's request for statehood. The first proposed to federally prohibit further slave migration into Missouri; the second would require all slave offspring, born after statehood, freed at 25 years of age.[2] At issue among southern legislators was the encroachment by their northern free state colleagues in what they considered a purely sectional concern: slave labor.[3]

Northern critics including Federalists and Republicans, objected to the expansion of slavery into the Louisiana Purchase territory on the Constitutional inequalities of the three-fifths rule, which conferred Southern representation in the federal government, derived from a states' slave population. Nonetheless, the more populous North held a firm numerical advantage in the House.[4] Jeffersonian Republicans in the North ardently maintained that a strict interpretation of the Constitution required that Congress act to limit the spread of slavery on egalitarian grounds.[5]

The slave-holding states were acutely aware that maintaining a balance in the number of free-to-slave states was necessary to ensure political equilibrium in the US Senate. With the Senate evenly split at the opening of the debates, both sections possessing 11 states, the admission of Missouri would give the South a two-seat advantage in the upper house and diminish the Northern lower house majority. The South sought to enlist Missouri to maintain Southern political preeminence and ensure security of their institutions.[6][7]

The Missouri question in the 15th Congress ended in stalemate on March 4, 1819, the House sustaining its northern antislavery position, and the Senate blocking a slavery restricted statehood.[8] Antislavery agitation grew in the North in the aftermath of the debates, leading to widespread opposition to slavery in Missouri.[9] As the 16th Congress assembled in December 1819, the two houses remained thoroughly polarized over slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territories.[10][11]

When the free-soil District of Maine offered its petition for statehood, the Senate quickly linked the Maine and Missouri bills, making Maine admission a condition for Missouri entering the Union with slavery unrestricted. Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois added a compromise proviso, excluding slavery from all remaining lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36 30’ parallel. The combined measures passed the Senate, only to be voted down in the House by those Northern representatives who held out for a free Missouri. Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry Clay of Kentucky, in a desperate bid to break the deadlock, divided the Senate bills. Clay and his pro-compromise allies succeeded in pressuring half the anti-restrictionist House Southerners to submit to the passage of the Thomas proviso, while maneuvering a number of restrictionist House northerners to acquiesce in supporting Missouri as a slave state. This was the Missouri Compromise.[12][13]

The legislation extracted by the compromisers served to effect a "brokered truce" or "armistice" rather than a genuine compromise. The crux of the Compromise was that it circumvented the deepening disaffection among Jeffersonian Republicans.[14][15]

The Missouri crisis would spur the formation of two powerful political organizations – the Democratic and Whig Parties – both committed to preserving the federal Union by means of sectional compromise and the suppression of the explosive proslavery and antislavery arguments that had surfaced over Missouri statehood. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 would hasten the growth of a mass antislavery coalition – the Republican Party –whose precepts of which were first formulated by Jeffersonian Republican restrictionists during the Missouri crisis.[16]

The Era of Good Feelings and Party "Amalgamation"

President James Monroe (1758–1831):James Monroe's presidency is almost synonymous with the Era of Good Feelings. He signed the Missouri Compromise bills with a conviction that doing so was the only way to prevent the rise of an antislavery party in the North. In emphasizing the political implications, Monroe "obscured the very real weight of antislavery sentiment involved in the [slavery] restrictionist movement." [17]

The Era of Good Feelings, closely associated with the administration of President James Monroe (1817–1825), was characterized by the dissolution of national political identities.[18][19] With the discredited Federalists in decline nationally, the "amalgamated" or hybridized Republicans adopted key Federalist economic programs and institutions, further erasing party identities and consolidating their victory.[20][21]

The economic nationalism of the Era of Good Feelings that would authorize the Tariff of 1816 and incorporate the Second Bank of the United States portended an abandonment of the Jeffersonian political formula for strict construction of the constitution, a limited central government and commitments to the primacy of Southern agrarian interests.[22][23] The end of opposition parties also meant the end of party discipline and the means to suppress internecine factional animosities. Rather than produce political harmony, as President James Monroe had hoped, amalgamation had led to intense rivalries among Jeffersonian Republicans.[24]

It was amid the "good feelings" of this period - during which Republican Party discipline was in abeyance - that the Tallmadge amendment surfaced.[25]

The Louisiana Purchase and Missouri Territory

The immense Louisiana Purchase territories had been acquired through federal executive action, followed by Republican legislative authorization in 1803 during the Thomas Jefferson administration.[26]

In the years following the War of 1812, the region, now known as Missouri Territory experienced rapid settlement, led by slaveholding planters.[27]

Prior to its purchase in 1803, the rulers of Spain and France had sanctioned slaveholding in the region. In 1812, the state of Louisiana, a major cotton producer and the first to be carved from the Louisiana Purchase, had entered the Union as a slave state. Predictably, Missourians were adamant that slave labor should not be molested by the federal government.[28]

Agriculturally, the land comprising the lower reaches of the Missouri River, from which that new state would formed, had no prospects as a major cotton producer. Suited for diversified farming, the only crop regarded as promising for slave labor was hemp culture. On that basis, southern planters immigrated with their chattel to Missouri, the slave population rising from 3,000 in 1810 to 10,000 in 1820. In a total population 66,000, slaves represented about 15 percent.[29]

By 1818, the population of Missouri territory was approaching the threshold that would qualify it for statehood. An enabling act was provided to Congress empowering territorial residents to select convention delegates and draft a state constitution.[30]

The admission of Missouri territory as a slave state was expected to be more or less routine.[31][32]

The 15th Congress Debates: 1819

James Tallmadge, Jr. (1778–1853) Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr. served only in the 15th Congress, but he left his mark on the proceeding of the 16th with his antislavery amendment to Missouri statehood.

When the Missouri statehood bill was opened for debate in the House of Representative on February 13, 1819, early exchanges on the floor proceeded without serious incident.[33]

In the course of these proceedings Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr. of New York "tossed a bombshell into the Era of Good Feelings" with the following amendments:[34]

Provided, that the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been fully convicted; and that all children born within the said State [of Missouri], after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.[35]

A political outsider, the 41-year old Tallmadge conceived his amendment based on a personal aversion to slavery. He had played a leading role in accelerating emancipation of the remaining slaves in New York in 1817. Moreover, he had campaigned against Illinois' Black Codes: though ostensibly free-soil, the new Illinois state constitution permitted indentured servitude and a limited form of slavery.[36][37] As a New York Republican, Tallmadge maintained an uneasy association with Governor DeWitt Clinton, a former Republican who depended on support from ex-Federalists. Clinton's faction was hostile to Tallmadge for his spirited defense of General Andrew Jackson over the Florida campaign against the Seminoles.[38][39]

Tallmadge had backing from a fellow New York Republican, Congressman John W. Taylor (not to be confused with legislator John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia) . Taylor also had antislavery credentials: In February, 1819, he had proposed similar slave restrictions on Arkansas territory in the House, but failed 89-87. He would lead the pro-Tallmadge antislavery forces during the 16th Congress in 1820.[40]

The amendment instantly exposed the polarization among Jeffersonian Republicans over the future of slavery in the nation.[41][42] Northern Jeffersonian Republicans formed a coalition across factional lines with remnants of the Federalists. Southern Jeffersonian united in almost unanimous opposition. The ensuing debates pitted the northern "restrictionists" (antislavery legislators who wished to bar slavery from the Louisiana territories) and southern "anti-restrictionists" (proslavery legislators who rejected any interference by Congress inhibiting slavery expansion).[43]

The sectional "rupture" over slavery among Jeffersonian Republicans, first exposed in the Missouri crisis, had its roots in the Revolutionary generation.[44]

Jeffersonian Republicanism and Slavery

Thomas Jefferson (1741–1826): The Missouri crisis roused Jefferson "like a fire bell in the night" believing the congressional impasse would lead to a sectional rupture in the American republican. Shifting from his early egalitarian origins, Jefferson would promote the theory of "diffusion" – expanding the slavery so as to end slavery[45]

The Missouri crisis marked a rupture in the Republican Ascendency – the national association of Jeffersonian Republicans that dominated national politics in the post-War of 1812 period.[46]

The Founders had inserted both principled and pragmatic elements in the establishing documents. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was grounded on the claim that liberty established a moral ideal that made universal equality a common right.[47] The Revolutionary War generation had formed a government of limited powers in 1787 to embody the principles in the Declaration, but "burdened with the one legacy that defied that principles of 1776": human bondage.[48] In a pragmatic commitment to form the Union, the federal apparatus would forego any authority to directly interfere with the institution of slavery where it existed under local control within the states. This acknowledgment of state sovereignty provided for the participation of those states most committed to slave labor. With this understanding, slaveholders had cooperated in authorizing the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, and to outlawing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808.[49] Though the Founders sanctioned slavery, they did so with the implicit understanding that the slaveholding states would take steps to relinquish the institution as opportunities arose.[50]

Southerners states, after the War for Independence, had regarded slavery as an institution in decline (with the exception of Georgia and South Carolina). This was manifest in the shift towards diversified farming in the Upper South, and in the gradual emancipation of slaves in New England, and more significantly, in the mid-Atlantic states. Beginning in the 1790s, with the introduction of the cotton gin, and by 1815, with the vast increase in demand for cotton internationally, slave based agriculture underwent an immense revival, spreading the institution westward to the Mississippi River. Slavery opponents in the South vacillated, as did their hopes for the imminent demise of human bondage.[51]

However rancorous the disputes among Southerners themselves over the virtues of a slave-based society, they united as a section when confronted by external challenges to their institution. The free states were not to meddle in the affairs of the slaveholders. Southern leaders – of whom virtually all identified as Jeffersonian Republicans – denied that Northerners had any business encroaching on matters related to slavery. Northern attacks on the institution were condemned as incitements to riot among the slave populations, - deemed a dire threat to white southern security.[52][53]

Northern Jeffersonian Republicans embraced the Jeffersionian antislavery legacy during the Missouri debates, explicitly citing the Declaration of Independence as an argument against expanding the institution. Southern Jeffersonian leaders would renounce the document's universal egalitarian applications.[54]

These Jeffersonian paradoxes stood at the center of the Jeffersonian Ascendency's clash over Missouri statehood and the "true meaning of the American Revolution".[55][56][57]

Struggle for Political Power

"Federal Ratio" in the House

Rufus King (1755–1827): A signatory to the US Constitution and last of the Federalist icons, Senator Rufus King of New York denounced the three-fifths rule as a Southern imposition upon the liberty of the Northeastern free states. King was dismayed by the charges of a Federalist conspiracy to establish a northern antislavery party – a conspiracy decoy concocted by southerners to distract slavery restrictionists.[58]

Article One, Section Two of the US Constitution supplemented legislative representation in those states where residents owned slaves. Known as the three-fifths clause or the "federal ratio", three-fifths (60%) of the slave population was numerically added to the free population. This sum was used to calculate Congressional districts per state, and the number of delegates to the Electoral College. The federal ratio produced a significant number of legislative victories for the South in the years preceding the Missouri crisis, as well as augmenting its influence in party caucuses, the appointment of judges and the distribution of patronage. It is unlikely that the three-fifths clause, prior to 1820, was decisive in affecting legislation on slavery. Indeed, with the rising northern representation in the House, the South's share of the membership had declined since the 1790s.[59][60]

Hostility to the federal ratio had historically been the object of the now nationally ineffectual Federalists; they blamed their collective decline on the "Virginia Dynasty", expressed in partisan terms rather than in moral condemnation of slavery. The pro-De Witt Clinton-Federalist faction carried on the tradition, posing as antirestrictionists, for the purpose of advancing their fortunes in New York politics.[61][62]

Senator Rufus King of New York, a Clinton associate, was the last Federalist icon still active on the national stage, a fact irksome to Southern Republicans.[63] A signatory to the US Constitution, he had strongly opposed the three-fifths rule in 1787. In the 1819 15th Congress debates, he revived his critique as a complaint that New England and Mid-Atlantic States suffered unduly from the federal ratio, declaring himself "degraded" (politically inferior) to the slaveholders. Federalists, North and South, preferred to mute antislavery rhetoric, but during the 1820 debates in the 16th Congress, King and other old Federalists would expand their critique to include moral considerations of slavery.[64][65]

Republican James Tallmadge, Jr. and the Missouri restrictionists deplored the three-fifths clause because it had translated into political supremacy for the South. They had no agenda to remove it from the founding document, only to prevent its further application west of the Mississippi River.[66][67]

As determined as Southern Republicans were to secure Missouri statehood with slavery, the three-fifths clause failed to provide the margin of victory in the 15th Congress. Blocked by Northern Republicans - largely on egalitarian grounds – with sectional support from Federalists, the bill would die in the upper house, where the federal ratio had no relevance. The "balance of power" between the sections, and the maintenance of Southern preeminence on matters related to slavery resided in the Senate.[68][69]

"Balance of Power" in the Senate

Northern voting majorities in the lower house did not translate into political dominance. The fulcrum for proslavery forces resided in the upper house of Congress. There, constitutional compromise n 1787 had provided for exactly two senators per state, regardless of its population: the South, with its small white demographic relative to the North, benefited from this arrangement. Since 1815, sectional parity in the Senate had been achieved through paired admissions, leaving the North and South, at the time of Missouri territory application for statehood, at eleven states each.[70]

The South, voting as a bloc on measures that challenged slaveholding interests and augmented by defections from Free State Senators with Southern sympathies, was able to tally majorities. The Senate stood as the bulwark and source of the Slave Power – a power that required admission of slave states to the Union to preserve its national primacy.[71][72]

Missouri statehood, with the Tallmadge amendment approved, would set a trajectory towards a Free State trans-Mississippi and a decline in Southern political authority. The question as to whether the Congress could lawfully restrain the growth of slavery in Missouri took on great importance among the slave states. The moral dimensions of the expansion of human bondage would be raised by Northern Republicans on constitutional grounds.[73][74]

Constitutional Arguments

The Tallmadge amendment was "the first serious challenge to the extension of slavery" and raised questions concerning the interpretation of the republics' founding documents.[75]

Jeffersonian Republicans justified Tallmadge's slavery restrictions on the grounds that Congress possessed the authority to impose territorial statutes which would remain in force after statehood was established. Representative John W. Taylor pointed to Indiana and Illinois, where their Free State status conformed to the antislavery provisions in the Northwest Ordinance. [76]

Timothy Fuller (1778–1835): Massachusetts Congressman Timothy Fuller declared that it was "the right and the duty" of Congress to inhibit its expansion into the territories, invoking the Declaration of Independence and Article Four, Section Four of the US Constitution - compelling all states to adhere to a republican form of government.[77]
John Scott (1785–1861): John Scott, the territorial delegate from Missouri, made the strongest claim to a slavery precedent in Missouri, declaring that the Louisiana Purchase Treaty of 1803 provided for the protection of the resident's property - including property in slaves.[78]

Further, antislavery legislators invoked Article Four, Section Four of the Constitution, which required that states provide a republican form of government. As the Louisiana Territory was not part of the United States in 1787, they argued, introducing slavery into Missouri would thwart the egalitarian intent of the Founders.[79][80]

Proslavery Republicans countered that the Constitution had long been interpreted as having relinquished any claim to restricting slavery within the states. The free inhabitants of Missouri, either in the territorial phase or during statehood, had the right to establish slavery – or disestablish it – exclusive of central government interference. As to the Northwest Ordinance, Southerners denied that this could serve as a lawful antecedent for the territories of the Louisiana Purchase, as the ordinance had been issue originally under the Articles of Confederation, not under the US Constitution.[81]

As a legal precedent, they offered the treaty acquiring the Louisiana lands in 1803: the document included a provision (Article 3) that extended the rights of US citizens to all inhabitants of the new territory, including the protection of property in slaves.[81] When slaveholders embraced Jeffersonian constitutional strictures on a limited central government they were reminded that Jefferson, as US President in 1803, had deviated from these precepts when he wielded federal executive power to double the size the United States (including the lands under consideration for Missouri statehood). In doing so, he set a Constitutional precedent that would serve to rationalize Tallmadge's federally imposed slavery restrictions.[82]

The 15th Congress debates, focusing at it did on constitutional questions, largely avoided the moral dimensions raised by the topic of slavery. That the unmentionable subject had been raised publicly was deeply offensive to Southern Congressmen, and violated the long-held sectional understanding between free and slave state legislators.[83]

Missouri statehood confronted Southern Jeffersonians with the prospect of applying the egalitarian principles espoused by the Revolutionary generation. This would require halting the spread of slavery westward, and confining the institution to where it already existed. Faced with a population of 1.5 million slaves, and the lucrative production of cotton, the South would abandon hopes for containment. Slaveholders in the 16th Congress, in an effort to come to grips with this paradox, would resort to a theory that called for extending slavery geographically so as to encourage its decline: "diffusion".[84][85]

Stalemate

On February 16, 1819, the House Committee of the Whole voted to link Tallmadge's provisions with the Missouri enabling legislation, approving the move 79-67.[86][87] Following the committee vote, debates resumed over the merits of each of Tallmadge's provisions in the enabling act. The debates in the House the 2nd session in 1819 lasted only three days.They have been characterized as "rancorous", "fiery", "bitter", "blistering", "furious" and "bloodthirsty".[88]

Representative Thomas W. Cobb of Georgia: "You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish."
Representative James Tallmadge, Jr. of New York: "If a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!"

Northern representatives outnumbered the South in House membership 105 to 81. When each of the restrictionist provisions were put to the vote, they passed along sectional lines: 87 to 76 in favor of prohibition on further slave migration into Missouri (Table 1) and 82 to 78 in favor of emancipating slave offspring at age twenty-five.[89][90]

Table 1. House vote on restricting slavery in Missouri.

15th Congress 2nd Session, February 16, 1819.

Yea* Nay Abst Total
Northern Federalists 22 3 3 28
Northern Republicans 64 7 7 77
North Total 86 10 9 105
South Total 1 66 13 80
House Total 87 76 22 185
*Yea is an antislavery (restrictionist) vote

The enabling bill was passed to the Senate, where both parts of the bill were rejected: 22 to 16 opposed to restricting new slaves in Missouri (supported by five northerners, two of whom were the proslavery legislators from the free state of Illinois); and 31 to 7 against gradual emancipation for slave children born post-statehood.[91] House antislavery restrictionists refused to concur with the Senate proslavery anti-restrictionists: Missouri statehood would devolve upon the 16th Congress in December 1819.[92][93]

Federalist "plots" and "Consolidation"

DeWitt Clinton (1769–1828): New York Governor Clinton, a stealth-Federalist, seized upon the Missouri controversy to discredit his local Republican adversaries – the Bucktails, as tools of the Slave Power. Clinton labeled this Republican faction, led by archenemy Martin Van Buren, the "Slave Ticket". Despite Governor Clinton's posturing as an antislavery zealot, most Federalists in New York and throughout the North were wary of the Tallmadge Amendment: Jeffersonian Republicans in the North would be its principle champions.[94]

The Missouri Compromise debates stirred suspicions among proslavery interests that the underlying purpose of the Tallmadge amendments had little to do with opposition to slavery expansion. The accusation was first leveled in the House by the Republican anti-restrictionist John Holmes from the District of Maine. He suggested that Senator Rufus King's "warm" support for the Tallmadge amendment concealed a conspiracy to organize a new antislavery party in the North – a party composed of old Federalists in combination with disaffected antislavery Republicans. The fact that King, in the Senate, and Tallmadge and Tyler, in the House – all New Yorkers – were among the vanguard for slavery restriction in Missouri lent credibility to these charges. When King was re-elected to the US Senate in January 1820, during the 16th Congress debates, and with bipartisan support, suspicions deepened and would persist throughout the crisis.[95][96] Southern Jeffersonian Republican leadership, including President Monroe and former President Thomas Jefferson considered it as an article of faith that Federalists, given the chance, would destabilize the Union so as to re-impose monarchal rule in North America, and "consolidate" political control over the people by expanding the functions of the central government. Jefferson, at first unperturbed by the Missouri question, soon became convinced that a northern conspiracy was afoot, with Federalists and crypto-Federalists posing as Republicans, using Missouri statehood as a pretext.[97]

Due to the disarray of the Republican Ascendency brought about by amalgamation, fears abounded among Southerners that a Free State party might take shape in the event that Congress fail to reach an understanding over Missouri and slavery: Such a party would threaten Southern preeminence. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts surmised that the political configuration for just such a sectional party already existed.[98][99] That the Federalists were anxious to regain a measure of political participation in national politics is indisputable. There was no basis, however, for the charge that Federalists had directed Tallmadge in his antislavery measures, nor was there anything to indicate that a New York-based King-Clinton alliance sought to erect an antislavery party on the ruins of the Republican Party. The allegations by Southern proslavery interests of a "plot" or that of "consolidation" as a threat to the Union misapprehended the forces at work in the Missouri crisis: the core of the opposition to slavery in the Louisiana Purchase were informed by Jeffersonian egalitarian principles, not a Federalist resurgence.[100][101]

Development in Congress

Extension of the Missouri Compromise Line westward was discussed by Congress during the Texas Annexation in 1845, during the Compromise of 1850, and as part of the proposed Crittenden Compromise in 1860, but the line never reached the Pacific.

To balance the number of "slave states" and "free states," the northern region of what was then Massachusetts, the District of Maine, ultimately gained admission into the United States as a free state to become Maine. This only occurred as a result of a compromise involving slavery in Missouri, and in the federal territories of the American west.[102] The admission of another slave state would increase the South's power at a time when northern politicians had already begun to regret the Constitution's Three-Fifths Compromise. Although more than 60 percent of whites in the United States lived in the North, by 1818 northern representatives held only a slim majority of congressional seats. The additional political representation allotted to the South as a result of the Three-Fifths Compromise gave southerners more seats in the House of Representatives than they would have had if the number was based on just free population. Moreover, since each state had two Senate seats, Missouri's admission as a slave state would result in more southern than northern senators.[103] A bill to enable the people of the Missouri Territory to draft a constitution and form a government preliminary to admission into the Union came before the House of Representatives in Committee of the Whole, on February 13, 1819. James Tallmadge of New York offered an amendment, named the Tallmadge Amendment, that forbade further introduction of slaves into Missouri, and mandated that all children of slave parents born in the state after its admission should be free at the age of 25. The committee adopted the measure and incorporated it into the bill as finally passed on February 17, 1819, by the house. The United States Senate refused to concur with the amendment, and the whole measure was lost.[104][105]

During the following session (1819–1820), the House passed a similar bill with an amendment, introduced on January 26, 1820, by John W. Taylor of New York, allowing Missouri into the union as a slave state. The question had been complicated by the admission in December of Alabama, a slave state, making the number of slave and free states equal. In addition, there was a bill in passage through the House (January 3, 1820) to admit Maine as a free state.[106]

The Senate decided to connect the two measures. It passed a bill for the admission of Maine with an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to form a state constitution. Before the bill was returned to the House, a second amendment was adopted on the motion of Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, excluding slavery from the Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north (the southern boundary of Missouri), except within the limits of the proposed state of Missouri.[107]

The vote in the Senate was 24 for the compromise, to 20 against. The amendment and the bill passed in the Senate on February 17 and February 18, 1820.[107] The House then approved the Senate compromise amendment, on a vote of 90 to 87, with those 87 votes coming from free state representatives opposed to slavery in the new state of Missouri.[107] The House then approved the whole bill, 134 to 42 (the latter votes being from southern states).[107]

Second Missouri Compromise

The two houses were at odds not only on the issue of the legality of slavery, but also on the parliamentary question of the inclusion of Maine and Missouri within the same bill. The committee recommended the enactment of two laws, one for the admission of Maine, the other an enabling act for Missouri. They recommended against having restrictions on slavery but for including the Thomas amendment. Both houses agreed, and the measures were passed on March 5, 1820, and were signed by President James Monroe on March 6.

The question of the final admission of Missouri came up during the session of 1820–1821. The struggle was revived over a clause in Missouri's new constitution (written in 1820) requiring the exclusion of "free negroes and mulattoes" from the state. Through the influence of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay "The Great Compromiser", an act of admission was finally passed, upon the condition that the exclusionary clause of the Missouri constitution should "never be construed to authorize the passage of any law" impairing the privileges and immunities of any U.S. citizen. This deliberately ambiguous provision is sometimes known as the Second Missouri Compromise.[108]

Impact on political discourse

Animation showing the free/slave status of U.S. states and territories, 1789–1861, including the Missouri Compromise.

During the decades following 1820, Americans hailed the 1820 agreement as an essential compromise almost on the sacred level of the Constitution itself.[109] Although the Civil War broke out in 1861, historians often say the Compromise helped postpone the war.[110]

These disputes involved the competition between the southern and northern states for power in Congress and for control over future territories. There were also the same factions emerging as the Democratic-Republican party began to lose its coherence.

In an April 22 letter to John Holmes, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the division of the country created by the Compromise Line would eventually lead to the destruction of the Union:[111]

...but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.[112][113]

Congress' consideration of Missouri's admission also raised the issue of sectional balance, for the country was equally divided between slave and free states with eleven each. To admit Missouri as a slave state would tip the balance in the Senate (made up of two senators per state) in favor of the slave states. For this reason, northern states wanted Maine admitted as a free state.

On the constitutional side, the Compromise of 1820 was important as the example of Congressional exclusion of slavery from U.S. territory acquired since the Northwest Ordinance.

Following Maine's 1820[114] and Missouri's 1821[115] admissions to the Union, no other states were admitted until 1836, when Arkansas was admitted.[116]

The Compromise was deeply disappointing to African-Americans in both the North and South. It stopped the southern progression of gradual emancipation at Missouri's southern border and legitimized slavery as a southern institution.[117]

Repeal

The provisions of the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north were effectively repealed by Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854. The repeal of the Compromise caused outrage in the North and sparked the return to politics of Abraham Lincoln,[118] who excoriated Douglas's act in his "Peoria Speech" (October 16, 1854).

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 125
    Wilentz, 2004. p. 382
  2. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 107
    Ammons, 1971. p. 449: "The bill itself was harmless, but not the amendment of Representative James Tallmadge, of New York, who proposed to alter the Missouri bill to require the emancipation of all slaves at the age of twenty-five and to forbid the further introduction of slavery. This measure reflected the antislavery sentiments of Northern Republicans, was unacceptable to [territorial] Missourians, who were deeply committed to the slave economy, as well as to Southerners, who saw their fundamental interests subject to direct attack. When the session ended, the issue, which had been only briefly discussed, was left unsettled. The House had approved the Tallmadge amendment by a slight majority, but the Senate had refused to accept any measurer imposing conditions on the admission of Missouri."
  3. ^ Brown, 1966. p. 22: "The insistence that slavery was uniquely a Southern concern, not to be touched by outsiders, had been from the outset a sine qua non for Southern participation in national politics. It underlay the Constitution and its creation of a government of limited powers, without which Southern participation would have been unthinkable."
    Wilentz, 2004. p. 379: "Missouri was…to be the second state carved out of the Louisiana Purchase [the cotton producing slave state of Louisiana was admitted in 1812] – and the precedent for Purchase land, although small, was proslavery."
    Ellis, 1996. p. 267: "[T]he debate [about Missouri] represented a violation of the sectional understanding" [that free-state leadership would maintain] "the vow of silence…In that sense, the real revolutionary legacy on the slavery question was not a belief in emancipation but rather a common commitment to delay and a common trust that northerners would not interfere with southern leadership in effecting a gradual policy of emancipation."
  4. ^ Howe, 2004. p. 150: "Despite the three-fifths rule, the northern majority in the House increased with every census reapportionment."
    Wilentz, 2016. p. 47: "[Critics of slavery] objected above all to the increasingly notorious three-fifths clause [which] inflated representation of the Southern states in Congress and the Electoral College"
    Malone: 1969: p. 418-419: "The free states were now forging ahead in total population and were gaining even faster in the House of Representatives, where they now had a definite majority. On the other hand, the delegation from the South was disproportionate to its free population, and the region actually [was awarded] representation for its slave population. This situation perplexed the Northerners, especially the New Englanders, who had suffered from political frustration since the Louisiana Purchase and who especially resented the rule of the Virginia Dynasty. Meanwhile, the admission of new free states and new slave states had been so timed that the balance between the North and the South had been maintained in the United States Senate."
    Dangerfield, 1965. p. 108-109: "[The North and East] had never been happy with the federal ratio…and it hardly agreed with their various interests for this apportionment to move across the Mississippi."
  5. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 387: "[Northern] Republicans rooted their antislavery arguments, not on expediency, but in egalitarian morality" and p. 389: "The Constitution, [said northern Jeffersonians] strictly interpreted, gave the sons of the founding generation the legal tools to hasten [the] removal [of slavery], including the refusal to admit additional slave states."
  6. ^ Wilentz, 2004. P. 379: "At stake were the terms of admission to the Union of the newest state, Missouri. The main issue seemed simple enough, but the ramifications were not. Since 1815, in a flurry of state admissions, the numbers of new slave and free states had been equal, leaving the balance of slave and free states nationwide and in the Senate equal. The balance was deceptive. In 1818, when Illinois gained admission to the Union, antislavery forces won a state constitution that formally barred slavery but included a fierce legal code that regulated free blacks and permitted the election of two Southern-born senators. In practical terms, were Missouri admitted as a slave state, the Southern bloc in the Senate might enjoy a four-vote, not a two-vote, majority.
  7. ^ Dangerfield, 1965: p. 110: "[T]he slaveholding states, in terms of population, were already in the minority [compared to free soil states]…and it became a matter of deep concern that Missouri should enter the Union as one of the slaveholding sisterhood. In that case, her [state] legislature would elect proslavery [US] Senators, and free-soil-slave soil equilibrium in the Senate would be maintained."
  8. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 110-111: "The debate which followed was relatively brief…On February 16, 1819, the Committee of the Whole, by a vote of 79 to 67, included the Tallmadge amendment in the enabling bill [for Missouri statehood]"…After some fiery and even bloodthirsty exchanges, the House passed the amendment: by a vote of 87-76 (on the first part, prohibiting the further introduction of slavery), and by a vote of 82-78 (on the second part, freeing all children born after the states admission)." And p. 111: "In the Senate, the first part was stricken out by a vote of 22 to 16, and the second by a vote of 31 to 7. The Fifteenth Congress had only two more days to live; the House refused to concur in the Senate's action; the Senate remained obdurate. Thus on March 4, 1819, the Missouri question was temporarily put to rest."
    Ammons, 1971. p. 449: "The House had approved the Tallmadge amendment by a slight majority, but the Senate had refused to accept any measurer imposing conditions on the admission of Missouri."
  9. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 380: "Instead of soothing passions, the ensuing nine-month recess aggravated them , as antislavery Northerners took their cause to the people Beginning in August, "free Missouri" meetings assembled in major town and cities from Maine to New Jersey and as far west as Illinois.
  10. ^ Ammons, 1971. p. 450: "By the end of 1819 the Tallmadge amendment had taken on a much more threatening aspect in the wake of the massive propaganda campaign and the innumerable public meetings organized in the Northern states by antislavery groups. The Southerners, naturally, replied in kind. Thus when Congress met in December of 1819, it was apparent that the deadlock of the previous session still existed but in a far more dangerous form. The national had split into two sectional blocks…In the House, the restrictionists had a ten-vote edge, whereas in the Senate the proslavery forces [remained] securely in command."
  11. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 380: "By a twelve-vote margin, the House re-approved Tallmadge's proposals, killing the statehood bill and handing the crisis over the Sixteenth Congress…Instead of soothing sectional passions, the ensuing nine-month recess aggravated them, as antislavery Northerners took their cause to the people [to oppose an further extension of slavery]"
    Howe, 2004. p. 151: "The opponents of slavery extension now took their case to the people. They organized antislavery demonstrations in northern states…"
    Ammons, 1971. p. 450: "By the end of 1819, the Tallmadge amendment had taken on a much more threatening aspect in the wake of the massive propaganda campaign and the innumerable public meetings organized in the Northern states by antislavery groups. The southerners naturally responded in kind. Thus when Congress met in December, it was apparent that the deadlock of the previous session still existed by in a far more dangerous form."
  12. ^ Brown, 1966. p. 25: "[Henry Clay], who managed to bring up the separate parts of the compromise separately in the House, enabling the Old Republicans [in the South] to provide him with a margin of victory on the closely contested Missouri [statehood] bill while saved their pride by voting against the Thomas Proviso."
  13. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 381: "A new Maine statehood bill passed the House after a bruising debate, but the Senate Judiciary committee added an amendment admitting Missouri without restriction of slavery. After uniting the Maine and Missouri statehood bills, the Senate then heard an amendment from Jesse B. Thomas, an Illinois anti-restrictionist that provided a germ of a compromise. As amended, the Senate bill would admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, and bar slavery from all additional states carved out of the Louisiana Purchase territory that lay north of latitude 36 30’. Sectional balance would be sustained; the North would concede the admission of Missouri as a slave state; and Southerners would give way on the principle, which they had upheld since the ratification of the Constitution, that Congress lacked authority to regulate slavery in entering the territories…but the antislavery dominated House, voting once again on sectional lines, dismissed the Senates proposals." And p. 389: "In the House, Clay proved an effective broker for sectional armistice, mobilizing one coalition to pass one half of the compromise, and a very different coalition to pass the other…"
  14. ^ Howe, 2004. p. 155: "What the Missouri Compromise really prevented was not the rebirth of the Federalist Party but the breakup of the Republican Party along sectional lines."
  15. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 392-393: "The Missouri Crisis deepened sectional divisions. Clay's bargain may have purchased temporary national political peace, but it was not an authentic compromise, in which both sides agreed to make sacrifices for the common good. By pushing the two halves of the Compromise through the House on separate votes, Clay helped to create an exaggerated appearance of sectional amity. In fact, many Southerners rejected the Compromise's assumptions about federal power in the territories, and either voiced or supported pro-slavery state rights doctrines that eventually informed Southern secession. An even larger proportion of Northerners opposed the expansion of slavery into Missouri and backed anti-slavery Jeffersonian doctrines that became basic principles of the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties. Jefferson's "fire bell" had alarmed mainstream political leaders like Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren. But their responses and the subsequent rise of the intersectional Democratic and Whig parties could not forever suppress the anti-slavery Jeffersonianism and the southern hardline pro-slavery arguments that arose so forcefully in 1819. Once the Missouri Compromise is understood as a brokered truce patched together by leaders frightened by the depth of sectional antagonisms, and not as a "doughface" capitulation to the slaveholders, the story of Jacksonian politics changes, and the instability of the Compromise and of the Jackson-era parties becomes much clearer.
  16. ^ Wilentz, 2004. P. 394: "Many antislavery Republicans…became national Republicans and later Whigs…others…became Jacksonian Democrats. But the submergence of Jeffersonian antislavery in the new intersectional parties did not last long…In 1854, following the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, they formed the Republican Party – recreating, in a new mass form, the Northern coalition of 1819 and 1820."
  17. ^ Ammons, 1971. p. 457-458
  18. ^ Ammon, 1958, p. 4: "The phrase 'Era of Good Feelings', so inextricably associated with the administration of James Monroe...
  19. ^ Brown, 1966. p. 23: "So long as the Federalists remained an effective opposition, Jefferson's party worked as a party should. It maintained its identity in relation to the opposition by a moderate and pragmatic advocacy of strict construction of the Constitution. Because it had competition, it could maintain discipline. It responded to its constituent elements because it depended on them for support. But eventually, its very success was its undoing. After 1815, stirred by the nationalism of the postwar era, and with the Federals in decline, the Republicans took up Federalist positions on a number of the great public issues of the day, sweeping all before then as they did. The Federalists gave up the ghost. In the Era of Good Feelings which followed, everybody began to call himself a Republican, and a new theory of party amalgamation preached the doctrine that party division was bad and that a one-party system best served the national interest. Only gradually did it become apparent that in victory the Republicans party had lost its identity - and its usefulness. As the party of the whole nation it ceased to be responsive to any particular elements in its constituency. It ceased to be responsive to the South...When it did [become unresponsive], and because it did, it invited the Missouri crisis of 1819–1820..."
  20. ^ Ammon, 1958, p. 5: "Most Republicans like former President [James] Madison readily acknowledged the shift that had taken place within the Republican party towards Federalist principles and viewed the process without qualms. And p. 4: "…The Republicans had taken over (as they saw it) that which was of permanent value in the Federal program." And p. 10: "…Federalists had vanished" from national politics.
  21. ^ Brown, 1966, p. 23: "…a new theory of party amalgamation preached the doctrine that party division was bad and that a one-party system best served the national interest" and "After 1815, stirred by the nationalism of the post-war era, and with the Federalists in decline, the Republicans took up the Federalist positions on a number of the great public issues of the day, sweeping all before them as they did. The Federalists gave up the ghost."
  22. ^ Brown, 1966, p. 22: "The insistence(FILL)…outside the South" and p. 23: The amalgamated Republicans, "as a party of the whole nation…ceased to be responsive to any particular elements in its constituency. It ceased to be responsive to the South." And "The insistence that slavery was uniquely a Southern concern, not to be touched by outsiders, had been from the outset a sine qua non for Southern participation in national politics. It underlay the Constitution and its creation of a government of limited powers…"
    Brown, 1966, p. 24: "Not only did the Missouri crisis make these matters clear [the need to revive strict constructionist principles and quiet anti-slavery agitation], but "it gave marked impetus to a reaction against nationalism and amalgamation of postwar Republicanism" and the rise of the Old Republicans.
  23. ^ Ammon, 1971 (James Monroe bio) p. 463: "The problems presented by the [consequences of promoting Federalist economic nationalism] gave an opportunity to the older, more conservative [Old] Republicans to reassert themselves by attributing the economic dislocation to a departure from the principles of the Jeffersonian era."
  24. ^ Parsons, 2009, p. 56: "Animosity between Federalists and Republicans had been replaced by animosity between Republicans themselves, often over the same issues that had once separated them from the Federalists."
  25. ^ Brown, 1966, p.28: "…amalgamation had destroyed the levers which made party discipline possible."
  26. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 36
    Ammons, 1971. p. 206
    Ellis, 1996. p. 266: "Jefferson had in fact worried out loud that the constitutional precedent he was setting with the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803. In that sense his worries proved to be warranted. The entire congressional debate of 1819–1820 over the Missouri Question turned on the question of federal versus state sovereignty, essentially a constitutional conflict in which Jefferson's long-standing opposition to federal power was clear and unequivocal, the Louisiana Purchase being the one exception that was now coming back to haunt him. But just as the constitutional character of the congressional debate served only to mask the deeper moral and ideological issues at stake, Jefferson's own sense of regret at his complicity in providing the constitutional precedent for the Tallmadge amendment merely scratched that surface of his despair."
  27. ^ Malone, 1969. p.419: "After 1815, settlers had poured across the Mississippi…Several thousand planters took their slaves in the area…"
  28. ^ Malone, 1960. p. 419: "[S]everal thousand planters took their slaves into the area believing that Congress would do nothing to disturb the institution, which had enjoyed legal protection in the territory of the Louisiana Purchase under its former French and Spanish rulers."
  29. ^ Dangerfield, 1966. p. 109
    Wilentz, 2004. P. 379: "Missouri, unlike Louisiana, was not suited to cotton, but slavery had been established in the western portions, which were especially promising for growing hemp, a crop so taxing to cultivate that it was deemed fit only for slave labor. Southerners worried that a ban on slavery in Missouri, already home to 10,000 slaves – roughly fifteen percent of its total population [85% whites] – would create a precedent for doing so in all the entering states from the trans-Mississippi West, thereby establishing congressional powers that slaveholders denied existed
  30. ^ Howe, 2004, p. 147: "By 1819, enough settlers had crossed the Mississippi River that Missouri Territory could meet the usual population criterion for admission to the Union." And "an 'enabling act' was presented to Congress [for Missouri statehood]."
    Malone, 1960. p. 419: "[S]ettlement had reached the point where Missouri, the next state [after Louisiana state] to be carved out of the Louisiana Purchase, straddled the line between the free and slave states."
  31. ^ Ammons, 1971. p. 449: "Certainly no one guessed in February 1819 the extent to which passions would be stirred by the introduction of a bill to permit Missouri to organize a state government."
  32. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 379: "When the territorial residents of Missouri applied for admission to the Union, most Southerners—and, probably, at first, most Northerners—assumed slavery would be allowed. All were in for a shock."
    Dangerfield, 1965. p. 107: Prior to the Tallmadge debates, the 15th Congress there had been "certain arguments or warnings concerning congressional powers in the territories; none the less… [Tallmadge's amendment] caught the House off its guard."
  33. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 106-107
  34. ^ Howe, 2004. p. 147
  35. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 107
  36. ^ Dangerfield, 1965, p. 110: "When Tallmadge, in 1818, attacked the indentured service and limited slavery provisions in the Illinois constitution, only thirty-four representatives voted with him against admission. The Tallmadge amendment of 1819, therefore, must also be considered the first serious challenge to the extension of slavery.
  37. ^ Howe, 2004. p. 147: "Tallmadge was an independent-minded Republican, allied at the time with Dewitt Clinton's faction in New York state politics. The year before, he had objected to the admission of Illinois on the (well-founded) grounds that its constitution did not provide enough assurance that the Northwest Ordinance prohibition on slavery would be perpetuated."
    Wilentz, 2004. p. 379: "In 1818, when Illinois gained admission to the Union, antislavery forces won a state constitution that formally barred slavery but included a fierce legal code that regulated free blacks and permitted the election of two Southern-born senators."
  38. ^ Howe, 2010. http://www.americanheritage.com/content/missouri-slave-or-free
  39. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 378: "A Poughkeepsie lawyer and former secretary to Governor George Clinton, Tallmadge had served in Congress for just over two years when he made his brief but momentous appearance in national politics. He was known as a political odd duck. Nominally an ally and kin, by marriage, of De Witt Clinton, who nonetheless distrusted him, Tallmadge was disliked by the surviving New York Federalists, who detested his defense of General Andrew Jackson against attacks on Jackson's military command in East Florida.
    Dangerfield, 1965. p. 107-108: "James Tallmadge, Jr. a representative [of New York state]…was supposed to be a member of the [DeWitt Clinton] faction in New York politics…may have offered his amendment because his conscience was affronted, and for no other reason.
  40. ^ Dangerfield, 1965: p. 107, footnote 28: In February 1819,[Taylor, attempted] to insert into a bill establishing a Territory of Arkansas an antislavery clause similar to [the one Tallmadge would shortly present]…and it "was defeated in the House 89-87."
    Dangerfield, 1965. p. 122
  41. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 376: "[T]he sectional divisions among the Jeffersonian Republicans…offers historical paradoxes…in which hard-line slaveholding Southern Republicans rejected the egalitarian ideals of the slaveholder [Thomas] Jefferson while the antislavery Northern Republicans upheld them – even as Jefferson himself supported slavery's expansion on purportedly antislavery grounds.
  42. ^ Dangerfleld, 1965. p. 111: "The most prominent feature of the voting at this stage was its apparently sectional character."
  43. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p.380,386
  44. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 376: "Jeffersonian rupture over slavery drew upon ideas from the Revolutionary era. It began with congressional conflicts over slavery and related matter in the 1790s. It reached a crisis during the first great American debate about slavery in the nineteenth century, over admission of Missouri to the Union."
  45. ^ Wilentz, 2004 p. 376: "When fully understood, however, the story of sectional divisions among the Jeffersonians recovers the Jeffersonian antislavery legacy, exposes the fragility of the "second party system" of the 1830s and 1840s, and vindicates Lincoln's claims about his party's Jeffersonian origins. The story also offers historical paradoxes of its own, in which hardline slaveholding Southern Republicans rejected the egalitarian ideals of the slave-holder Jefferson while anti-slavery Northern Republicans upheld them—even as Jefferson himself supported slavery's expansion on purportedly antislavery grounds. The Jeffersonian rupture over slavery drew upon ideas from the Revolutionary era. It began with congressional conflicts over slavery and related matters in the 1790s. It reached a crisis during the first great American debate about slavery in the nineteenth century, over the admission of Missouri to the Union."
    Ellis, 1995.p. 265, 269 and 271
  46. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 376
  47. ^ Miller, 2996. p 16
  48. ^ Ellis 1995. p. 265: "[T]he idea of prohibiting the extension of slavery into the western territories could more readily be seen as a fulfillment rather than a repudiation of the American Revolution, indeed as the fulfillment of Jefferson's early vision of an expansive republic populated by independent farmers unburdened by the one legacy that defied the principles of 1776 [slavery]"
  49. ^ Brown, 1966. p. 22: "The insistence that slavery was uniquely a Southern concern, not to be touched by outsiders, had been from the outset a sine qua non for Southern participation in national politics. It underlay the Constitution and its creation of a government of limited powers, without which Southern participation would have been unthinkable."
  50. ^ Ellis, 1996. p. 267: "[The Founders silence on slavery] was contingent upon some discernible measure of progress toward ending slavery."
  51. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 383: "Not since the framing and ratification of the Constitution in 1787–88 had slavery caused such a tempest in national politics. In part, the breakthrough of emancipation in the Middle States after 1789—especially in New York, where James Tallmadge played a direct role—emboldened Northern antislavery opinion. Southern slavery had spread since 1815. After the end of the War of 1812, and thanks to new demand from the Lancashire mills, the effects of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, and the new profitability of upland cotton, slavery expanded into Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Between 1815 and 1820, U.S. cotton production doubled, and, between 1820 and 1825, it doubled again. Slavery's revival weakened what had been, during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era, a widespread assumption in the South, although not in South Carolina and Georgia, that slavery was doomed. By the early 1820s, Southern liberal blandishments of the post-Revolutionary years had either fallen on the defensive or disappeared entirely
  52. ^ Brown, 1966. p. 22: "…there ran one compelling idea that virtually united all Southerners, and which governed their participation in national politics. This was that the institution of slavery should not be dealt with from outside the South. Whatever the merits of the institution – and Southerners violently disagreed about this, never more so than in the 1820s – the presence of the slave was a fact too critical, too sensitive, too perilous to be dealt with by those not directly affected. Slavery must remain a Southern question."
  53. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 383: "Southerner leaders – of whom virtually all identified as Jeffersonian Republicans – denied that Northerners had any business encroaching on matters related to slavery. Northern attacks on the institution were regarded as incitements to riot among the slave populations, - deemed a dire threat to white southern security. Tallmadge's amendments horrified Southern congressmen, the vast majority of whom were Jeffersonian Republicans. They claimed that, whatever the rights and wrongs of slavery, Congress lacked the power to interfere with its expansion. Southerners of all factions and both parties rallied to the proposition that slavery must remain a Southern question.
  54. ^ Wilentz, 2004 p. 376: "When fully understood, however, the story of sectional divisions among the Jeffersonians recovers the Jeffersonian antislavery legacy, exposes the fragility of the "second party system" of the 1830s and 1840s, and vindicates Lincoln's claims about his party's Jeffersonian origins. The story also offers historical paradoxes of its own, in which hardline slaveholding Southern Republicans rejected the egalitarian ideals of the slave-holder Jefferson while anti-slavery Northern Republicans upheld them—even as Jefferson himself supported slavery's expansion on purportedly antislavery grounds. The Jeffersonian rupture over slavery drew upon ideas from the Revolutionary era. It began with congressional conflicts over slavery and related matters in the 1790s. It reached a crisis during the first great American debate about slavery in the nineteenth century, over the admission of Missouri to the Union."
  55. ^ Ellis, 1995. p. 270: "[The Missouri debate was] over the true meaning of the American Revolution…Missouri made the long-standing paradox of slavery that [Jefferson and his southern associates] had been living so deftly into an undeniable contradiction… This was not a tolerable realization, just as it was not tolerable to recognize that northern politicians had seized the moral high ground..."
  56. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 114-115: "[T]he political and sectional problem originally raised by the Tallmadge amendment…failed to conceal the profound renunciation of human rights [in slavery expansion]…the principle of equality had been brought home to the North…"
  57. ^ Varon, 2008. p. 39: "The Missouri debates, first and foremost, arguments about just what the compromises of 1787 really meant – what the Founders really intended".
  58. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 119-120: "[T]he notion that a Federalist-Clintonian alliance was 'plotting' to build a new northern party out of the ruins of the Republican Ascendency was never absent from the Missouri debates…King…was most unhappy."
    Ammons, 1971, p. 454: [President Monroe] and other Republicans were convinced that behind the attempts to exclude slavery from Missouri was a carefully concealed plot to revive the party divisions of the past either openly as Federalists or in some new disguise.
  59. ^ Wilentz, 2016. p. 101: "The three-fifths clause certainly inflated Southerners power in the House, not simply in affecting numerous roll-call votes – roughly one in three overall of those recorded between 1795 to 1821 – but in shaping the politics of party caucuses…patronage and judicial appointments. Yet even with the extra seats, the share held by major slaveholding states actually declined between 1790 to 1820, from 45% to 42%...[and] none of the bills listed in the study concerned slavery, whereas in 1819, antislavery Northerners, most of them Jeffersonian Republicans, rallied a clear House majority to halt slavery's expansion."
  60. ^ Varon, 2008. p. 40: "The three-fifths clause inflated the South's representation in the House. Because the number of presidential electors assigned to each state was equal to the size of its congressional delegation…the South had power over the election of presidents that was disproportionate to the size of the region's free population…since Jefferson's accession in 1801, a "Virginia Dynasty" had ruled the White House."
    Malone, 1960. p. ?: "The constitutional provision relating to slavery that bore most directly on the [Missouri controversy] was three-fifths ratio of representation, sometimes called the federal ratio. The representation of any state in the lower house of Congress was based on the number of its free inhabitants, push three-fifths of its slaves. The free states were now [1820] forging ahead in total population, where now had a definite majority. On the other hand, the delegation from the South was disproportionate to its free population, and the region actually had representation for its slave property. This situation vexed the Northerners, especially the New Englanders, who had suffered from political frustration since the Louisiana Purchase, and who especially resented the rule of the Virginia Dynasty."
    Wilentz, 2016. p. 47: "[Federalists] objected above all to the increasingly notorious three-fifths clause [which] inflated representation of the Southern states in Congress and the Electoral College"
  61. ^ Wilentz, 2016. p. 99: "[Federalist hostility to Jefferson and the Virginia Dynasty] nothing about slavery or its cruelties showed up – except (in what had become a familiar sour-grapes excuse among Federalists for their national political failures) how the three-fifths clause aided the wretched…Jeffersonians."
  62. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 109: "The federal ratio…had hitherto been an object of the Federalist-Clintonian concern [rather than the Northern Jeffersonian Republicans]; whether the Republicans of the North and East would have gone to battle over Missouri is their hands had not been forced by Tallmadge's amendment is quite another question."
    Howe, 2004, p. 150
    Brown, 1966. p. 26
  63. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 385
  64. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 385: "More than thirty years after fighting the three-fifths clause at the Federal Convention, King warmly supported banning slavery in Missouri, restating the Yankee Federalist fear of Southern political dominance that had surfaced at the disgraced Hartford Convention in 1814. The issue, for King, at least in his early speeches on Missouri, was not chiefly moral. King explicitly abjured wanting to benefit either slaves or free blacks. His goal, rather, was to ward off the political subjugation of the older northeastern states—and to protect what he called 'the common defense, the general welfare, and [the] wise administration of government.' Only later did King and other Federalists begin pursuing broader moral and constitutional indictments of slavery.
  65. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 121, footnote 64
  66. ^ Varon, 2008. p. 39: "…they were openly resentful of the fact that the three-fifths clause had translated into political supremacy for the South.
    Dangerfield, 1965. p. 109: "[The federal ratio] hardly agreed with [the restrictionists] various interests for this apportionment to move across the Mississippi River. Tallmadge [remarked the trans-Mississippi region] 'had no claim to such unequal representation, unjust upon the other States."
  67. ^ Howe, 2004. p. 150: "The Missouri Compromise also concerned political power...many [Northerners] were increasingly alarmed at the disproportionate political influence of the southern slaveholders...[resenting the three-fifths clause]."
  68. ^ Wilentz, 2016. p. 102-103: "The three-fifths clause guaranteed the South a voting majority on some, but hardly all [critical matters]…Indeed, the congressional bulwark of what became known, rightly, as the Slave Power proved not to be the House, but the Senate, where the three-fifths rule made no difference." And "The three-fifths clause certainly did not prevent the House from voting to exclude slavery from the new state of Missouri in 1819. The House twice passed [in the 15th Congress] by substantial margins, antislavery resolutions proposed by [Tallmadge] with the largely Northern Republican majority founding its case on Jefferson's Declaration [of Independence]…The antislavery effort would die in the Senate, where, again, the three-fifths clause made no difference."
  69. ^ Howe, 2004. p. 150: "...but if slavery were on the road to ultimate extinction in Missouri, the state might not vote with the proslavery bloc. In such power calculations, the composition of the Senate was of even greater moment than that of the House...So the South looked to preserve its sectional equality in the Senate."
  70. ^ Varon, 2008. p. 40: "[T]he North's demographic edge [in the House] did not translate into control over the federal government, for that edge was blunted by constitutional compromises. The fact that the Founders had decided that each state, however large or small, would elect two senators meant the South's power in the Senate was disproportionate to its population, and that maintaining a senatorial parity between North and South depended on bringing in equal numbers of free and slave states.
    Ammons, 1971. p. 450: "The central concern in the debates…had been over the [senatorial] balance of power, for the Southern congressmen had concentrated their objections upon the fact that the admission of Missouri would forever destroy the equal balance then existing between [the number of] free and slave states."
  71. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 379: "At stake were the terms of admission to the Union of the newest state, Missouri. The main issue seemed simple enough, but the ramifications were not. Since 1815, in a flurry of state admissions, the numbers of new slave and free states had been equal, leaving the balance of slave and free states nationwide and in the Senate equal. The balance was deceptive. In 1818, when Illinois gained admission to the Union, antislavery forces won a state constitution that formally barred slavery but included a fierce legal code that regulated free blacks and permitted the election of two Southern-born senators. In practical terms, were Missouri admitted as a slave state, the Southern bloc in the Senate might enjoy a four-vote, not a two-vote majority.
    Howe, 2004. p. 150
  72. ^ Wilentz, 2016. p. 102: "[T[he congressional bulwark of what came to be known, rightly, as the Slave Power proved not to be the House but the Senate…"
  73. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 114-115: "The political and sectional problem originally raised by the Tallmadge amendment, the problem of the control of the Mississippi Valley, quite failed to conceal [the] profound renumciation of human rights."
  74. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 387: "According to the Republicans, preservation of individual rights and strict construction of the Constitution demanded the limitation of slavery and the recognition…Earlier and more passionately than the Federalists, Republicans rooted their antislavery arguments, not in political expediency, but in egalitarian morality—the belief, as Fuller declared, that it was both "the right and duty of Congress" to restrict the spread "of the intolerable evil and the crying enormity of slavery." Individual rights, the Republicans asserted, has been defined by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence…If all men were created equal, as Jefferson said, then slaves, as men, were born free and, under any truly republican government, entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As the Constitution, in Article 4, section 4, made a republican government in the states a fundamental guarantee of the Union, the extension of slavery into areas where slavery did not exist in 1787 was not only immoral but unconstitutional."
  75. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 110
    Varon, 2008. p. 39: "The Missouri debates, first and foremost, arguments about just what the compromises of 1787 really meant – what the Founders really intended.
  76. ^ Varon, 2008. p. 40: "Tallmadge [and his supporters] made the case that it was constitutional for Congress to legislate the end of slavery in Missouri after its admission to statehood [to determine] the details of its government."
    Wilentz, 2005. p. 123
  77. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 387
  78. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 397: "Missouri delegate John Scott would claim a stronger precedent, charging that the third article of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase treaty with France prevented Congress from banning slavery in any state carved out of the Purchase lands."
  79. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 387: "According to the Republicans, preservation of individual rights and strict construction of the Constitution demanded the limitation of slavery and the recognition, in Fuller's words, that "all men have equal rights," regardless of color. Earlier and more passionately than the Federalists, Republicans rooted their antislavery arguments, not in political expediency, but in egalitarian morality—the belief, as Fuller declared, that it was both "the right and duty of Congress" to restrict the spread "of the intolerable evil and the crying enormity of slavery." Individual rights, the Republicans asserted, has been defined by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—"an authority admitted in all parts of the Union [as] a definition of the basis of republican government." If all men were created equal, as Jefferson said, then slaves, as men, were born free and, under any truly republican government, entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As the Constitution, in Article 4, section 4, made a republican government in the states a fundamental guarantee of the Union, the extension of slavery into areas where slavery did not exist in 1787 was not only immoral but unconstitutional."
  80. ^ Ellis, 1995. p. 266: "[T]he idea of prohibiting the extension of slavery into the western territories could more readily be seen as a fulfillment rather than a repudiation of the American Revolution, indeed as the fulfillment of Jefferson's early vision of an expansive republic populated by independent farmers unburdened by the one legacy that defied the principles of 1776 [slavery]"
  81. ^ a b Varon, 2008. p. 40
  82. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p, 379: footnote (8)
    Ellis, 1995. p.266
  83. ^ Ellis, 1995. p.266-267: "[W]hat most rankled Jefferson [and southern Republicans] about the debate over the Missouri Question was that it was happening at all. For the debate represented a violation of the sectional understanding and the vow of silence..."
  84. ^ Ellis, 1995. p. 268: "Only a gradual policy of emancipation was feasible, but the mounting size of the slave population made any gradual policy unfeasible...and made any southern-sponsored solution extremely unlikely...the enlightened southern branch of the revolutionary generation...had not kept its promise to [relinquish slavery]." and p. 270: "All [of the Revolutionary generation at the time] agreed that ending slavery depended on confining it to the South...isolating it in the South."
  85. ^ Ammons, 1971. p. 450: "...if slavery were confined to the states where it existed, the whites would eventually desert these regions...would the [abandoned area] be accepted as black republics with representation in Congress?...a common southern view [held] that the best way to ameliorate the lot of the slave and [achieving] emancipation, was by distributing slavery throughout the Union."
  86. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 110
  87. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 379-380
  88. ^ Howe, 2004. p. 148
    Dangerfield, 1965. p. 111
    Holt, 2004. p. 5-6
    Wilentz, 2004. p. 380
    Dangerfield, 1965. p. 111
  89. ^ Howe, 2004. p. 150
  90. ^ Burns, 1982. P. 242-243
  91. ^ Dangerfield, 1965. p. 111
  92. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 380
  93. ^ Wilentz, 2004 p. 380 (Table 1 adapted from Wilentz)
  94. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 385-386: "In New York, Clinton seized upon the Missouri crisis and delivery strong antislavery remarks to taint his pro-Van Buren opponents, the so-called 'Bucktails', as 'the slave ticket'. Yet Northern Federalists, either on their own or in alliance with Clintonians, were not the core antislavery constituency, let alone conspiratorial [creationists]" and p. 389: "Many Bucktails, including Van Buren, although not proslavery, remained lukewarm about restriction. They suspected that their arch-enemy DeWitt Clinton stood to profit politically from a restrictionist victory and that antislavery pressure on the South would endanger their political fortunes and the Union itself."
  95. ^ Ammons, 1971. p. 454: "[President Monroe] and other Republicans were convinced that behind the attempt to exclude slavery from Missouri was a carefully concealed plot to revive the party divisions of the past either openly as Federalism or some new disguise. He drew his conclusion from several circumstances…[Rufus King had emerged] as the outstanding congressional spokesman of the restrictionists…[and that he] was in league with De Witt Clinton [who was pursuing his own presidential ambitions outside the Republican Party]…to [Monroe's] way of thinking, the real objective of these leaders was power…that they were willing accept disunion, if their plans could not be achieved in any other fashion…[and that] Tallmadge was one of Clinton's close associates [added weight to his suspicions]…[the Union could not] survive the formation of parties based on a North-South sectional alignment."
    Ellis, 1995. p. 270: "The more [Thomas Jefferson] though about the debate over Missouri, the more he convinced himself that the real agenda had little to do with slavery at all"
  96. ^ Howe, 2004. p. 151: "Republicans [in Congress] accused [King] of fanning flames of northern sectionalism is revitalize the Federalist Party."
    Dangerfield, 1965. p. 119: "An insinuation, made very early in the House [by Mr. Holmes, who wish to detach the Maine statehood from that of Missouri] was the first to suggest that the purpose behind the movement to restrict [slavery in] Missouri was a new alignment of parties. New York, he hinted, was the center of this conspiracy; and he barely concealed his belief that Rufus King and [Governor] De Witt Clinton – a Federalist and (and many believed) a crypto-Federalist – were its leaders." And "In 1819 [King had expressed himself] with… too great a warmth in favor of the Tallmadge amendment, and in January 1820, he was re-elected to the by a legislative composed [of both New York factions]…From then onward, the notion that a Federalist-Clintonian alliance was 'plotting' to build a new northern party out of the ruins of the Republican Ascendency was never absent from the Missouri debates."
  97. ^ Ellis, 1995. p. 270-271
  98. ^ Brown, 1966. p. 23
  99. ^ Ellis, 1995. p. 217: "'Consolidation' was the new term that Jefferson embraced – other Virginians were using it too – to label the covert goals of these alleged conspirators. In one sense the consolidationists were simply the old monarchists in slightly different guise…[a] flawed explanation of…the political forces that had mobilized around the Missouri Question [suspected of being organized] to maximize its coercive influence over popular opinion."
  100. ^ Wilentz, 2004. p. 3885-386: "No evidence exists to show that Clinton or any New England Federalist helped to instigate the Tallmadge amendments. Although most Northern Federalists backed restriction, they were hardly monolithic on the issue; indeed, in the first key vote on Tallmadge's amendments over Missouri, the proportion of Northern Republicans who backed restriction surpassed that of Northern Federalists. "It is well known," the New Hampshire Republican William Plumer, Jr. observed of the restrictionist effort, "that it originated with Republicans, that it is supported by Republicans throughout the free states; and that the Federalists of the South are its warm opponents."
    Dangerfield, 1965. p. 122: "There is no trace of a Federalist 'plot', at least as regards the origins of the Tallmadge amendment; there was never a Federalist-Clinton 'conspiracy'…"
    Howe, 2004. p. 151
  101. ^ Ammons, 1971. p. 454-455: "Although there is nothing to suggest that the political aspirations of the Federalists were responsible for the move to restrict slavery in Missouri, once the controversy erupted for Federalists were not unwilling to consider the possibility of a new political alignment. They did not think in terms of a revival of Federalism, but rather of establishing a liaison with discontented Republicans which would offer them an opportunity to re-engage in political activity in some other form than a permanent minority." And p. 458: "In placing this emphasis upon political implications of the conflict over Missouri [e.g. Federalist 'plots' and 'consolidation'], Monroe and other Southerners obscured the very real weight of antislavery sentiment involved in the restrictionist movement."
  102. ^ Dixon, 1899 p. 184
  103. ^ White, Deborah Gray (2013). Freedom On My Mind: A History of African Americans. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 215.
  104. ^ Dixon, 1899 pp. 49–51
  105. ^ Forbes, 1899 pp. 36–38
  106. ^ Dixon, 1899 pp. 58–59
  107. ^ a b c d Greeley, Horace. A History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension Or Restriction in the United States, p. 28 (Dix, Edwards & Co. 1856, reprinted by Applewood Books 2001).
  108. ^ Dixon, 1899 pp. 116–117
  109. ^ Paul Finkelman (2011). Millard Fillmore: The 13th President, 1850–1853. Henry Holt. p. 39.
  110. ^ Leslie Alexander (2010). Encyclopedia of African American History. ABC-CLIO. p. 340.
  111. ^ Brown, 1964 p.69
  112. ^ Peterson, 1960 p.189
  113. ^ "Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes". April 22, 1820. Retrieved 2012-11-18.
  114. ^ "Maine Becomes a State". Library of Congress. March 15, 1820. Retrieved 2012-11-18.
  115. ^ "Missouri Becomes a State". Library of Congress. August 10, 1821. Retrieved 2012-11-18.
  116. ^ "Arkansas Becomes a State". Library of Congress. Retrieved 2012-11-18.
  117. ^ White, Deborah Gray (2013). Freedom On My Mind: A History of African Americans. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. pp. 215–216.
  118. ^ "Lincoln at Peoria". Retrieved 2012-11-18.

References

Cited in footnotes

  • Brown, Richard H. 1966. Missouri Crisis, Slavery, and the Politics of Jacksonianism in South Atlantic Quarterly. LXV (Winter 1966) pp. 5–72 in Essays on Jacksonian America, Ed. Frank Otto Gatell. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. New York. 1970.
  • Burns, James M. 1982. The Vineyard of Liberty (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982) (ISBN 0394505468).[1]
  • Dangerfield, George. 1965. The Awakening of American Nationalism: 1815–1828. Harper & Row. New York. ISBN 9780881338232
  • Ellis, Joseph A. 1996. American sphinx: the character of Thomas Jefferson. Alfred A. Knopf. New York ISBN 978-0679764410
  • Howe, Daniel W. 2007. What hath God wrought: the transformation of America, 1815–1848. Oxford University Press. New York. ISBN 978-0195392432
  • Malone, Dumas and Rauch, Basil. 1960. Empire for Liberty: The Genesis and Growth of the United States of America. Appleton-Century Crofts, Inc. New York.
  • Miller, William L. 1995. Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress Borzoi Books, Alfred J. Knoff. ISBN 0-394-56922-9
  • Staloff, Darren. 2005. Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding. Hill and Wang, New York. ISBN 0-8090-7784-1
  • Varon, Elizabeth R.. 2008. Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859. University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill, NC ISBN 978-0-8078-3232-5
  • Wilentz, Sean. 2004. Jeffersonian Democracy and the Origins of Political Antislavery in the United States: The Missouri Crisis Revisited in The Journal of the Historical Society IV: 3 Fall 2004
  • Wilentz, Sean. 2016. The Politicians & the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics. W.W. Norton & Company. New York. ISBN 978-0-393-28502-4

Bibliography

Further reading

  • Brown, Richard Holbrook. (1964). The Missouri compromise: political statesmanship or unwise evasion?,
Heath, p. 85, Url
  • Moore, Glover. (1967). The Missouri controversy, 1819–1821,
University of Kentucky Press (Original from Indiana University), p. 383, Url
  • Woodburn, James Albert. (1894). The historical significance of the Missouri compromise,
Government Printing Office, Washington DC, p. 297, Url
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
  1. ^ "The Vineyard of Liberty".
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