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The Senate passed the amended legislation and returned it to the House. The amended Senate bill evoked considerable sectional rancor in the lower chamber. House Speaker Henry Clay had to use his considerable skills to forge a consensus. Eventually, he got his colleagues to enact two bills—one admitting Maine to the Union and another, which included the Thomas Amendment, enabling the citizens of Missouri to draft a state constitution with no restrictions upon slavery.
Together, the two pieces of legislation became known as the Missouri Compromise. Congress passed the compromise legislation on March 5, , and President James Monroe signed it into law the next day. Constitution, Missouri became the 24th state on August 10, Besides settling the issues at hand, namely the admission of the states of Missouri and Maine to the Union, the Missouri Compromise had other important consequences.
It temporarily muffled the debate over slavery or at least the extension of slavery in the United States, although the abolitionist movement continued to grow in the North.
Beyond that, it also established the precedent that Congress could regulate slavery in the territories even though the Constitution did not address the issue. The slavery issue reached crisis proportions once again in when Congress struggled over the disposition of new territories acquired during the Mexican-American War. The Compromise of , authored by Clay and shepherded through Congress by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas , formally codified the concept of popular sovereignty, which Douglas and Michigan Senator Lewis Cass championed.
In , the Kansas-Nebraska Act — which also invoked popular sovereignty — gutted the key provision of the Missouri Compromise regarding slavery in the Missouri Territory. Three years later, the U. Sandford , nurtured the growth of the Republican Party, alienating Southerners even more.
The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in , proved to be the death knell of the spirit of compromise. From the county of Franklin, one representative. Louis, eight representatives. From the county of Jefferson, one representative. From the county of Washington, three representatives. Genevieve, four representatives. From the county of Madison, one representative. From the county of Cape Girardeau, five representatives. From the county of New Madrid, two representatives.
From the county of Wayne, and that portion of the county of Lawrence which falls within the boundaries herein designated, one representative. And the election for the representatives aforesaid shall be holden on the first Monday, and two succeeding days of May next, throughout the several counties aforesaid in the said territory, and shall be, in every respect, held and conducted in the same manner, and under the same regulations as is prescribed by the laws of the said territory regulating elections therein for members of the general assembly, except that the returns of the election in that portion of Lawrence county included in the boundaries aforesaid, shall be made to the county of Wayne, as is provided in other cases under the laws of said territory.
And be it further enacted, That until the next general census shall be taken, the said state shall be entitled to one representative in the House of Representatives of the United States. And be it further enacted, That the following propositions be, and the same are hereby, offered to the convention of the said territory of Missouri, when formed, for their free acceptance or rejection, which, if accepted by the convention, shall be obligatory upon the United States: First.
That section numbered sixteen in every township, and when such section has been sold, or otherwise disposed of, other lands equivalent thereto, and as contiguous as may be, shall be granted to the state for the use of the inhabitants of such township, for the use of schools. That all salt springs, not exceeding twelve in number, with six sections of land adjoining to each, shall be granted to the said state for the use of said state, the same to be selected by the legislature of the said state, on or before the first day of January, in the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five ; and the same, when so selected, to be used under such terms, conditions, and regulations, as the legislature of said state shall direct: Provided, That no salt spring, the right whereof now is, or hereafter shall be, confirmed or adjudged to any individual or individuals, shall, by this section, be granted to the said state: And provided also, That the legislature shall never sell or lease the same, at anyone time, for a longer period than ten years, without the consent of Congress.
Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Speaker of the House, maintained that if Maine were to be admitted, then Missouri should be, too. From this came the notion that states be admitted in pairs, one slave and one free. Senator Jesse B.
Thomas of Illinois proposed an amendment allowing slavery below the parallel 36 degrees, 30 minutes in the vast Louisiana Purchase territory, but prohibiting it above that line. That parallel was chosen because it ran approximately along the southern border of Missouri. Though the compromise measure quelled the immediate divisiveness engendered by the Missouri question, it intensified the larger regional conflict between North and South.
It served notice to the North that Southerners not only did not intend for slavery to end, they wanted to expand its presence. For nearly 30 years, the compromise worked, with two states being admitted together, one slave, one free. Then, in , California was admitted as a stand-alone free state, upsetting the balance 16—15, in exchange for a Congressional guarantee no restrictions on slavery would be placed on the territories of Utah or New Mexico and passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required citizens of all states to return any runaway slaves to their masters.
In , the U. Supreme Court ruled Congress had no right to prohibit slavery in territories, as part of the decision in the Dred Scott case.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of repealed the dividing line for slavery in the Louisiana Purchase area. But with all the good that the Louisiana Purchase brought to the United States, it also presented the growing country with a difficult and painful question: Should the states created out of that land be slave or free?
Louisiana had been carved out and accepted as a slave state in , but no other territory had petitioned Congress for statehood out of the purchase lands until Missouri did so in , also wanting to enter the Union as a slave state.
Missouri compromise summary –
The Missouri Compromise was United States federal legislation that balanced desires of northern states to prevent expansion of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it. Southerners objected to any bill that imposed federal restrictions on slavery and believed that it was a state issue, as settled by the Constitution. However, with the Senate evenly split at the opening of the debates, both sections possessing 11 states, the admission of Missouri as a slave state would give the South an advantage.
Northern critics including Federalists and Democratic-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 state's slave population.
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.
When free-soil 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 as a slave state. Senator Jesse B. The combined measures passed the Senate, only to be voted down in the House by Northern representatives who held out for a free Missouri. Speaker of the House 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 of the anti-restrictionist House Southerners to submit to the passage of the Thomas proviso and maneuvered a number of restrictionist House northerners to acquiesce in supporting Missouri as a slave state.
The Missouri Compromise was very controversial, and many worried that the country had become lawfully divided along sectional lines. Sandford , both of which increased tensions over slavery and contributed to the American Civil War. The compromise both delayed the Civil War and sowed its seeds; Thomas Jefferson writing contemporaneously predicted the line it had drawn would someday tear the Union apart.
The Era of Good Feelings , closely associated with the administration of President James Monroe — , was characterized by the dissolution of national political identities. The economic nationalism of the Era of Good Feelings authorized the Tariff of and incorporated the Second Bank of the United States , which 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.
Rather than produce political harmony, as President James Monroe had hoped, amalgamation had led to intense rivalries among Democratic-Republicans.
It was amid that period's "good feelings" during which Democratic-Republican Party discipline was in abeyance that the Tallmadge Amendment surfaced. The immense Louisiana Purchase territories had been acquired through federal executive action, followed by Republican legislative authorization in under President Thomas Jefferson.
Prior to its purchase in , the governments of Spain and France had already sanctioned and promoted slavery in the region. Louis and Ste. In , Congress limited the further introduction of enslaved men and women to those introduced by actual settlers. In addition, in appointing the officials from the Indiana Territory to Upper Louisiana as Missouri was known until , Congress heightened concerns that it intended to extend some sort of prohibition on slavery's growth across the river.
White Missourians objected to these restrictions, and in , Congress withdrew them. The final version of the territorial ordinance omitted all references to slavery.
Under the ordinance, slavery existed legally in Missouri which included all of the Louisiana Purchase outside of Louisiana by force of local law and territorial statute, rather than by territorial ordinance, as was the case in other territories where slavery was permitted.
It is unknown if Congress purposely omitted any reference to slavery or Article VI in the territorial ordinance.
Nonetheless, over the next fifteen years, some restrictionists — including Amos Stoddard – claimed that this omission was deliberate, intended to allow the United States government to prohibit slavery in Missouri if circumstances proved more favorable in the future. In , 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. Agriculturally, the land in the lower reaches of the Missouri River, from which that new state would be 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, and the slave population rose from 3, in to 10, in By , 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. When the Missouri statehood bill was opened for debate in the House of Representatives on February 13, , early exchanges on the floor proceeded without serious incident. 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 after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.
A political outsider, the year-old Tallmadge conceived his amendment based on a personal aversion to slavery. He had played a leading role in accelerating the emancipation of the remaining slaves in New York in and had campaigned against Illinois's Black Codes.
Though ostensibly free-soil, the new state had a constitution that permitted indentured servitude and a limited form of slavery. Clinton's faction was hostile to Tallmadge for his spirited defense of General Andrew Jackson 's contentious invasion of Florida.
After proposing the amendment, Tallmadge fell ill, and Representative John W. Taylor , a fellow New York Republican, stepped in to fill the void. Taylor also had antislavery credentials since in February , he had proposed a similar slave restriction for Arkansas Territory in the House, which was defeated 89— The controversy on the amendment and the future of slavery in the nation created much dissension among Jeffersonian Republicans and polarized the party.
Southern Jeffersonians united in almost unanimous opposition. The ensuing debates pitted the northern "restrictionists", antislavery legislators who wished to bar slavery from the Louisiana Territory and all future states and territories, and southern "anti-restrictionists", proslavery legislators who rejected any interference by Congress that inhibited slavery expansion.
Five Representatives in Maine were opposed to spreading slavery into new territories. In , they voted against the Missouri Compromise and against Maine's independence. In their defense, they wrote that, if the North, and the nation, embarked upon this Compromise—and ignored what experiences proved, namely that southern slaveholders were determined to dominate the nation through ironclad unity and perpetual pressure to demand more land, and more slaves—then these five Mainers declared Americans "shall deserve to be considered a besotted and stupid race, fit, only, to be led blindfold; and worthy, only, to be treated with sovereign contempt".
The Missouri crisis marked a rupture in the Republican Ascendency, the national association of Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans that had dominated federal politics since the War of The Founding Fathers had inserted both principled and expedient elements in the establishing documents.
The Declaration of Independence in had been grounded on the claim that liberty established a moral ideal that made universal equality a common right. The acknowledgment of state sovereignty provided for the participation of the states that were the most committed to slave labor.
With that understanding, slaveholders had co-operated in authorizing the Northwest Ordinance in and outlawing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in Southern states, after the American Revolutionary War , had regarded slavery as an institution in decline except for Georgia and South Carolina. That was manifest in the shift towards diversified farming in the Upper South ; the gradual emancipation of slaves in New England and more significantly in Mid-Atlantic States.
In the s, with the introduction of the cotton gin , to , with the vast increase in demand for cotton internationally, slave-based agriculture underwent an immense revival that spread the institution westward to the Mississippi River. Antislavery elements in the South vacillated, as did their hopes for the imminent demise of human bondage.
However rancorous the disputes were by southerners themselves over the virtues of a slave-based society, they united against external challenges to their institution. They believed that free states were not to meddle in the affairs of slave states. Southern leaders, virtually all of whom 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 by slave populations, which was deemed to be a dire threat to white southerners' security. Northern Jeffersonian Republicans embraced the Jeffersonian antislavery legacy during the Missouri debates and explicitly cited the Declaration of Independence as an argument against expanding the institution. Southern leaders, seeking to defend slavery, renounced the document's universal egalitarian applications and its declaration that " all men are created equal.
Article 1, Section 2 , of the US Constitution supplemented legislative representation in states whose residents owned slaves. Known as the Three-Fifths Clause , or the "federal ratio", three-fifths of the slave population was numerically added to the free population.
That sum was used for each state to calculate congressional districts 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 before the Missouri Crisis and raised the South's influence in party caucuses, the appointment of judges, and the distribution of patronage.
It is unlikely that the ratio before was decisive in affecting legislation on slavery. Indeed, with the rising northern representation in the House, the southern share of the membership had declined since the s. Hostility to the federal ratio had historically been the object of the Federalists, which were now nationally ineffectual, who attributed their collective decline on the " Virginia Dynasty ".
They expressed their dissatisfaction in partisan terms, rather than in moral condemnation of slavery, and the pro-De Witt Clinton-Federalist faction carried on the tradition by posing as antirestrictionists to advance their fortunes in New York politics. Senator Rufus King of New York, a Clinton associate, was the last Federalist icon still active on the national stage, a fact that was irksome to southern Republicans.
In the 15th Congress debates in , he revived his critique as a complaint that New England and the Mid-Atlantic States suffered unduly from the federal ratio and declared himself 'degraded' politically inferior to the slaveholders. Federalists both in the North and the South preferred to mute antislavery rhetoric, but during the debates in the 16th Congress, King and other Federalists would expand their old critique to include moral considerations of slavery.
Republican James Tallmadge Jr. They had no agenda to remove it from the Constitution but only to prevent its further application west of the Mississippi River.
As determined as southern Republicans were to secure Missouri statehood with slavery, the federal clause ratio to provide the margin of victory in the 15th Congress. The balance of power between the sections and the maintenance of Southern pre-eminence on matters related to slavery resided in the Senate. Northern majorities in the House did not translate into political dominance. The fulcrum for proslavery forces resided in the Senate, where constitutional compromise in had provided for two senators per state, regardless of its population.
The South, with its smaller free population than the North, benefited from that arrangement. Since , sectional parity in the Senate had been achieved through paired admissions, which left the North and the South, during the application of Missouri Territory, at 11 states each. The South, voting as a bloc on measures that challenged slaveholding interests and augmented by defections from free states with southern sympathies, was able to tally majorities.
The Senate stood as the bulwark and source of the Slave Power , which required admission of slave states to the Union to preserve its national primacy. Missouri statehood, with the Tallmadge Amendment approved, would have set a trajectory towards a free state west of the Mississippi and a decline in southern political authority. The question as to whether the Congress was allowed to restrain the growth of slavery in Missouri took on great importance in slave states.
The moral dimensions of the expansion of human bondage would be raised by northern Republicans on constitutional grounds. The Tallmadge Amendment was "the first serious challenge to the extension of slavery" and raised questions concerning the interpretation of the republic's founding documents.
Jeffersonian Republicans justified Tallmadge's restrictions on the grounds that Congress possessed the authority to impose territorial statutes that would remain in force after statehood was established. Representative John W. Taylor pointed to Indiana and Illinois, where their free state status conformed to antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance. Further, antislavery legislators invoked Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which requires states to provide a republican form of government.
As the Louisiana Territory was not part of the United States in , they argued that introducing slavery into Missouri would thwart the egalitarian intent of the Founders.
Proslavery Republicans countered that the Constitution had long been interpreted as having relinquished any claim to restricting slavery in the states. The free inhabitants of Missouri in the territorial phase or during statehood had the right to establish or disestablish slavery without interference from the federal government. As to the Northwest Ordinance, southerners denied that it could serve as a lawful antecedent for the territories of the Louisiana Purchase, as the ordinance had been issued under the Articles of Confederation , rather than the US Constitution.
As a legal precedent, they offered the treaty acquiring the Louisiana lands in , a document that included a provision, Article 3, which extended the rights of US citizens to all inhabitants of the new territory, including the protection of property in slaves. In doing so, he set a constitutional precedent that would serve to rationalize Tallmadge's federally-imposed slavery restrictions.
– Missouri compromise summary
Henry Clay is often given credit for the passage Missouri Compromise because he used his considerable influence as Speaker of the House of Representatives to forge a consensus in Congress. Image Source: Library of Congress. The Missouri Compromise comprised legislation passed by the U. Congress in that attempted to resolve sectional disputes over the extension of slavery in western territories of the United States.
When delegates to the Constitutional Convention assembled in Philadelphia in , one of the more daunting tasks that they faced was resolving sectional differences between the North and South centered on the issue of slavery. In the short term, the compromises regarding the status of slavery established in the Constitution facilitated the creation of the new republic at the expense of blacks held in bondage , but they also sowed the seeds of turmoil that began coming to fruition as the nation expanded west in the coming decades.
As the delegates to the Constitutional Convention set about creating a new government, representatives to the Congress of the existing government established under the Articles of Confederation , known as the Confederation Congress , were meeting in New York.
For the next three decades, that boundary forestalled major sectional disputes over slavery. Circumstances changed in when Napoleon Bonaparte sold President Thomas Jefferson , square miles of land west of the Mississippi River. The Louisiana Purchase created new challenges for the federal government. Besides land ownership issues regarding the native inhabitants, Congress eventually had to address the question of the expansion of slavery in the new territory.
Settlers began pouring into the new territory, many of them slaveholders from the South. In , when the residents of Missouri petitioned Congress for statehood, roughly 8, to 10, slaves lived in the territory. In January, residents of the territory petitioned the U. House of Representatives for statehood, but the House did not consider the measure during that session.
In December , Missouri residents petitioned Congress for statehood a second time. The House took up the request during the next session. Southerners expected Congress to admit Missouri as a slave state, but on February 13, , New York Congressman James Tallmadge introduced an amendment to the Missouri statehood measure that would gradually end slavery in the new state. The Tallmadge Amendment also mandated the emancipation of all children of slaves born in the State of Missouri upon reaching the age of twenty-five.
The Tallmadge Amendment started a year of bitter debate in both houses of Congress. On February 17, , the House passed a bill recommending Missouri statehood, including the Tallmadge Amendment, by a vote of 82 to 78, and forwarded it to the Senate.
The upper chamber never voted on the proposed legislation. During the following session of Congress, on January 3, , the House passed legislation to admit Maine to the Union as a free state. Later that month, the lower chamber revisited the proposal for Missouri statehood. On January 26, , John W. Taylor of New York introduced an amendment allowing Missouri to enter the union as a slave state, which the House adopted. The Senate tied the two bills together, passing a single bill admitting Maine to the Union and an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to draft a state constitution.
The proposed legislation hinged upon an important second amendment introduced by Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois. The original bill provided for a trade-off: admitting Maine as a free state in return for admitting Missouri as a slave state, thus maintaining the balance of power in the Senate twelve free states and twelve slave states.
The Senate passed the amended legislation and returned it to the House. The amended Senate bill evoked considerable sectional rancor in the lower chamber. House Speaker Henry Clay had to use his considerable skills to forge a consensus. Eventually, he got his colleagues to enact two bills—one admitting Maine to the Union and another, which included the Thomas Amendment, enabling the citizens of Missouri to draft a state constitution with no restrictions upon slavery.
Together, the two pieces of legislation became known as the Missouri Compromise. Congress passed the compromise legislation on March 5, , and President James Monroe signed it into law the next day. Constitution, Missouri became the 24th state on August 10, Besides settling the issues at hand, namely the admission of the states of Missouri and Maine to the Union, the Missouri Compromise had other important consequences. It temporarily muffled the debate over slavery or at least the extension of slavery in the United States, although the abolitionist movement continued to grow in the North.
Beyond that, it also established the precedent that Congress could regulate slavery in the territories even though the Constitution did not address the issue. The slavery issue reached crisis proportions once again in when Congress struggled over the disposition of new territories acquired during the Mexican-American War.
The Compromise of , authored by Clay and shepherded through Congress by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas , formally codified the concept of popular sovereignty, which Douglas and Michigan Senator Lewis Cass championed. In , the Kansas-Nebraska Act — which also invoked popular sovereignty — gutted the key provision of the Missouri Compromise regarding slavery in the Missouri Territory.
Three years later, the U. Sandford , nurtured the growth of the Republican Party, alienating Southerners even more. The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in , proved to be the death knell of the spirit of compromise. Ultimately, only the tragedy of four years of civil war would determine the future of the Union, and slavery in the United States. Content for this article has been compiled by AHC Staff members.
