The sectional concerns of the 1820s repeatedly influenced politics. The depression of 1819-1822 increased tensions by making people feel more strongly about the issues of the day. For example, manufacturers who wanted high tariffs in 1816 were more vehemently in favor of protection in 1820 when their business fell off. Even when economic conditions improved, geographic alignments on key issues tended to solidify.
One of the first and most critical of the sectional questions concerned the admission of Missouri as a slave state. When Louisiana entered the Union in 1812, the rest of the Louisiana Purchase was organized as the Missouri Territory. Building on a nucleus of Spanish and French inhabitants, the region west and north of St. Louis grew rapidly, and in 1817 the Missourians petitioned for statehood. A large percentage of the settlers—the population exceeded 60,000 by 1818— were Southerners who had moved into the valleys of the Arkansas and Missouri rivers. Since many of them owned slaves, Missouri would become a slave state.
The admission of new states had always been a routine matter in keeping with the admirable pattern established by the Northwest Ordinance. But during the debate on the Missouri Enabling Act in February 1819, Congressman James Tallmadge of New York introduced an amendment prohibiting “the further introduction of slavery” and providing that all slaves born in Missouri after the territory became a state should be freed at age 25.
While Tallmadge was merely seeking to apply in the territory the pattern of race relations that had developed in the states immediately east of Missouri, his amendment represented, at least in spirit, something of a revolution. The Northwest Ordinance had prohibited slavery in the land between the Mississippi and the Ohio, but that area had only a handful of slaveowners in 1787 and little prospect of attracting more. Elsewhere no effort to restrict the movement of slaves into new territory had been attempted. If one assumed (as whites always had) that the slaves themselves should have no say in the matter, it appeared democratic to let the settlers of Missouri decide the slavery question for themselves. Nevertheless, the Tallmadge amendment passed the House, the vote following sectional lines closely. The Senate, however, resoundingly rejected it. The less populous southern
This cartoon for the 1824 election shows Adams's "low pressure” ship sailing toward the victory dock, while Jackson's "high pressure” ship explodes before reaching the dock and the victory prize of the White House. Although Jackson won a plurality of both the popular and electoral votes in the election, he failed to win the necessary majority, and the House of Representatives had to choose the winner from among the top three candidates. When Henry Clay's supporters in the House gave their votes—and the victory—to John Quincy Adams, the Jacksonians complained of having been cheated by a "corrupt bargain.”
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Slave states and territories'
Free states and territories Open to slavery by Missouri Compromise Closed to slavery by Missouri Compromise Missouri Compromise line
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The Missouri Compromise, 1820 The Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state, and Maine as a free state, retaining a balance in the Senate: Half of the nation's 24 states allowed slavery; half did not. The Compromise also drew an imaginary line along the 36°30' latitude (northern boundary of Arkansas): Slavery would be allowed in the lands to the south of the line.
Part of Missouri was then organized separately as the Arkansas Territory, and an attempt to bar slavery there was stifled. The Missouri Enabling Act failed to pass before Congress adjourned.
When the next Congress met in December 1819, the Missouri issue came up at once. The vote on Tallmadge’s amendment had shown that the rapidly growing North controlled the House of Representatives. Southerners thought it vital to preserve a balance in the Senate. Yet Northerners objected to the fact that Missouri extended hundreds of miles north of the Ohio River, which they considered slavery’s natural boundary. Angry debate raged in Congress for months.
The debate did not turn on the morality of slavery or the rights of blacks. Northerners objected to adding new slave states because under the Three-Fifths Compromise these states would be overrepresented in Congress (60 percent of their slaves would be counted in determining the size of the states’ delegations in the
House of Representatives) and because they did not relish competing with slave labor. Since the question was political influence rather than the rights and wrongs of slavery, a compromise was worked out in 1820. Missouri entered the Union as a slave state and Maine, having been separated from Massachusetts, was admitted as a free state to preserve the balance in the Senate.
To prevent further conflict, Congress adopted the proposal of Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, that “forever prohibited” slavery in all other parts of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30' latitude, the westward extension of Missouri’s southern boundary. Although this division would keep slavery out of most of the territory, Southerners accepted it cheerfully. The land south of the line, the present states of Arkansas and Oklahoma, seemed ideally suited for the expanded plantation economy, and most persons considered the treeless northern regions little better than a desert. One northern senator, decrying the division,
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