A series of events and debates concerning the admission of Missouri to statehood and the question of whether SLAVERY should be allowed to extend into the western territories resulted in the Missouri Compromise. In 1818, the legislature of Missouri Territory petitioned Congress for statehood. By this time, the territory had gained sufficient population to become a state, with most of its residents hailing from the South. Many of these settlers had brought slaves with them; slavery had also existed in the territory when it was a French colony. Thus, the territorial legislature wanted Missouri to be admitted to the Union as a slave state. In February 1819, Representative James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to the Missouri statehood bill. The Tallmadge amendment banned the importation of slaves to Missouri and called for the gradual emancipation of slaves already living there. Southern opposition to his amendment was immediate and nearly universal. The issue of slavery had not caused such tension since the Constitutional Convention of 1787. As was the case in 1787, the new controversy over slavery centered on a battle for power between free northern states and southern states with slave economies. Northern politicians were still bitter about the constitutional compromise, which allowed southern states to count each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation. Because northern politicians already believed the southern states possessed an unfair advantage in representation in Congress, the prospect of Missouri entering the Union as a slave state further threatened northern power.
But the battle over slavery during the Missouri controversy was not only about political representation. On the proslavery side, the increased passion with which southern slaveholders defended the slave system was due to the increasing value of their slaves. After the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and given the expansion into new territories with a climate ideal for growing cotton, the profitability of the slave system (previously believed to be on the wane) soared. Thus, slaveholders began to respond to any antislavery proposals with increased vehemence. Tallmadge’s proposal triggered intense debate in Congress, dividing the North and the South into sectional interests—an early version of the ideological and economic divide that would lead to war four decades later.
The Tallmadge amendment eventually passed in the House but was defeated in the Senate. Southern senators passed another version of the statehood bill, omitting the
Tallmadge Amendment. Thus, negotiations began about how to reconcile the two bills. The heated debates centered on two central problems: maintaining a balance of power between slave and free states in Congress and whether the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River, applied to Missouri. Concerning the first point, by 1819 there were 11 free states and 11 slave states. Northerners were concerned that admitting Missouri as a slave state would upset this balance of power in Congress and give southern interests control over the federal government. The problem of a shift in the balance of legislative power was temporarily solved when Maine petitioned for statehood as a free state in 1820. With the addition of Maine, northerners’ fears of a southern-controlled Congress were temporarily allayed.
Confronting the second point of contention proved more difficult. Because Missouri was part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and therefore not covered under the Northwest Ordinance, debates arose over whether the 1787 law applied to this territory. (The constitutional compromise had been to allow slavery to continue in the South but ban it from the territories north of the Ohio River through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.) A settlement was eventually reached in which Missouri would be a slave state, but all other parts of the Louisiana Territory north of the 36°30' line (roughly the extension of the border between Missouri and Arkansas) would be free. Although this element of the compromise is usually attributed to Henry Clay, it was actually proposed by Senator J. B. Thomas of Illinois. The admission of Maine as a free state and the designation of Thomas’s compromise line seemed to put an end to the conflict, until Missouri proposed a constitution that banned free blacks and mulattoes from the state. This new provision rekindled northern anger. Henry Clay proposed another compromise, offering a vaguely worded resolution stating that this exclusionary clause in the Missouri constitution should never be interpreted so as to violate the rights of any citizen. This resolution implicitly weakened the ability of free blacks to claim the rights of citizenship—a handicap that would become increasingly oppressive in the following decades. But this last compromise resolution succeeded in saving the larger agreement. The compromise legislation finally passed on February 26, 1821. One week later, Missouri was admitted into the Union as a slave state.
This sectional divide over the Missouri question brought to the surface the elemental problem that the founding fathers had failed to resolve in the constitutional debates—namely, how to reconcile the creation of a free republic with a society that relied on and sanctioned slavery. Were the provisions in the Constitution allowing for slavery in the South meant to imply that slavery should expand into new territories or simply be maintained as custom in the places where it was firmly entrenched? Did the
Constitution’s framers intend to allow slavery to expand or just to exist where it already was? Was society in the newly settling West going to be controlled by slaveholding southerners or by nonslaveholding northerners? These crucial, divisive questions would only temporarily be addressed by the compromises reached in 1820 and 1821. The underlying problems would continue to fester, coming to a head again during the controversies surrounding FUGITIVE slave laws and the Compromise of 1850. The Thomas Proviso prohibiting slavery north of the compromise line was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case of 1857. The bitter conflict over the extension of slavery into the West finally exploded in the violent upheaval of the Civil War, which broke out in 1861. While it failed to provide a permanent solution to the conflict over slavery, the Missouri Compromise temporarily eased the tensions between rival states and established a pattern for the future entrance of slave and free states into the Union.
Further reading: George Dangerfield, The Awakening of American Nationalis-m, 1815-1828 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Don Edward Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery & The Meaning of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Glover B. Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819-1821 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1953).
—Eleanor H. McConnell and Rita M. Broyles
World History
