When President Thomas Jefferson purchased 828,000 acres of heartland from Napoleon of France for a little more than $11 million in 1803, he was overjoyed with the prospect of securing the vital Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans for America's interests. 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 1812, but no other territory had petitioned Congress for statehood out of the purchase lands until Missouri did so in 1818, also wanting to enter the Union as a slave state. That request threatened to unsettle a delicate balance of 11 slave and 11 free states, a balance both sides found necessary for maintaining equal representation in the Senate.
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The fledgling abolitionist movement saw a chance to bring its cause to the foreground, and the issue of slavery in Missouri was thrown before the House of Representatives in February 1819 when James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to ban slavery within the boundaries of the new state. Tallmadge also advocated gradual emancipation for the thousands of chattels already living there.
That amendment set off contentious debates within the House and brought the issue of slavery into the national spotlight once again, after the topic had been comparatively quiet since the late 18th century.Southerners adamantly fought the Tallmadge Amendment, protesting the imbalance of representation that having one more free than slave state would cause, as well as the unveiled threat on the institution so critical to the plantation economy.
On the other side of the aisle, most Northern representatives were not abolitionists and cared little for slaves as people, but supported Tallmadge because they believed slavery posed a threat to the farm-and-industry economic model just beginning to take hold above the Mason-Dixon line. In short, they didn't want large plantations taking all the land from free husbandmen and their families.
In mid-February 1819, the Tallmadge Amendment passed the House by a vote of 82 to 78, but both the slavery ban and the emancipation proposals were defeated in the Senate.
The issue remained at an impasse until December when Maine and Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House from Kentucky who owned slaves but had famously proclaimed that he was an American first and a Southerner second, entered the debate. Maine, up to that time a part of Massachusetts, wanted to enter as a free state, and Clay decreed that could not occur unless Missouri came in with slavery.
In February 1820, Illinois Senator Jesse B.Thomas suggested a proposal that would eventually be called the Missouri Compromise: Maine would enter as a free state, Missouri would come in with slaves, but no slavery would be permitted in other states developed out of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude, Missouri's southern boundary. The Thomas proposal was accepted in the Senate but defeated in the House, and ardent debate along sectional lines resumed in Congress.
Clay stepped into the fray again and used his considerable influence and power as House speaker to work with both his Northern and Southern colleagues and have them accept Thomas' compromise as a resolution to the situation. In early March, Congress finally agreed on what they called the Missouri Compromise.
Many congressmen remained shaken by the controversy. Slavery had once again proved to be an issue that divided the nation along sectional lines. Southerners had been thrown on the defensive to justify their "peculiar institution," Northerners had fumed that "slave power" was trying to take up all the land, and abolitionists such as Congressman Arthur Livermore of New Hampshire wondered "how long will the desire for wealth render us blind to the sin of holding…our fellow men in chains?"
he Missouri Compromise would prove to be only a temporary solution to the growing slavery crisis. For 25 years the situation regarding territorial settlement remained relatively calm. But when the Mexican War in 1846-48 brought more land under the United States' control, the nettlesome issue flared up again. Once more, Henry Clay had to step in to hammer out a compromise—and once more it would be only temporary, as more and more crises over slavery erupted.
As the early debates over Missouri's admission raged, perhaps no one was more unsettled than the man who had purchased all that cheap land west of the Mississippi River. In 1820 Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that the fight over slavery in Missouri "like a fire bell in the night, awakened me and filled me with terror." Jefferson would die in 1826, but the fire bells over slavery had just begun to toll.
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I agree with Congressman Arthur Livermore, when will the yearning for more money and wealth ever stop? I know that it’s our nature as humans to want more of what we have in order to be satisfied. It was never fair to those African Americans who were pulled from their home land to come and be forced to be property because we wealthy whites can’t do it ourselves. If another country would have done that to us, we would have gone insane about and wouldn’t give up without a fight. But when we took those innocent people from their home, some fought back but when they did, they ended up being killed by their “master”. Just because we see someone who is different from us doesn’t make us their masters, they are human just like we are who just have a different skin tone because of their location. If you cut open a person who is white and who is black, you would most likely get the same results. Having a war against one another over whether there should be slaves or not was unnecessary for our country to have even gone into. We are better than that. There shouldn’t have been a compromise for Missouri just so peace could be kept between the north and south. We could have a found another way around it.
I think you need to recognize nearly 200 years have passed since slavery was common place. No justification here, just recognize cultures and people were sadly very different back then.
Though we have come a long long way, I do agree there is still much to be done in bringing our focus on a person's actions, not appearance. We seem to have replaced the focus on skin color to how pretty one is these days, and I see far more discrimination on that front, so perhaps we haven't changed much after all??
It’s amazing of how long it took before South Carolina succeeded and the Civil War finally broke out. The Missouri Compromise showed exactly why there would be a Civil War and who would be on each side. The way the article refers to slavery is very inhumane in the fact that it doesn’t describe it for as it is, it’s forced manual labor for life. This articles acts as if slavery is a political status that doesn’t mean much. The reason why the article portrays slavery like this is because the citizens of the United States at the time thought of slavery only in this manner and used it to benefit the economy. It wasn’t thought of as a social or ethical aspect. Racism exists in the world today but it is nothing compared to how it was then. African Americans were thought of as tools or animals to do their labor for free. Also the union didn’t really care whether Missouri was a free or slave state, it was a matter of flexing their political muscles to prove that one side of the union was better than the other. Missouri’s geographic location isolated it from economic and political affairs.
I agree with what Arthur Livermore said, slavery was a terrible thing that a lot of the people of this country agreed with. People are people regardless of their skin color. White people should never have treated African Americans in such a way. When white people forced African Americans into slavery, it was because they were being lazy. African Americans are humans just like white people, so why treat them like animals? Personally, I do not understand what was going through peoples’ minds when they put people into slavery. What made the people that agreed with slavery actually agree with it? Humans are humans. Color does not matter. All humans should be treated with the same amount of respect.