The Missouri Compromise
An agreement among members of Congress only temporarily prevented hostilities between North and South.
The first major sectional conflict in American history had roots in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The purchase doubled the size of America and prompted debate over how slavery should be regulated in the new territory. The debate intensified in 1818 when John Scott, a non-voting member of the House of Representatives, requested statehood for a portion of the Louisiana Purchase called the Missouri Territory.
A bill was submitted in the House authorizing Missouri to draft a state constitution and form a government in preparation for statehood. Slavery was not prohibited in the bill, which meant that it was implicitly permitted. The bill was not voted upon until early 1819.
Admitting Missouri to the Union threatened to disrupt the delicate balance of 11 slave and 11 free states represented in Congress. To prevent shifting the balance of power to the South, Congressman James Tallmadge of New York offered amendments to the Missouri bill prohibiting further slave importation into the territory and gradually emancipating the slaves already there.
The Missouri bill narrowly passed after fierce debate, largely because northerners outnumbered southerners in the House. However, the Senate contained an equal number of northerners and southerners, and since Missouri already allowed slavery, the Missouri bill was approved only after removing the Tallmadge amendments. When the revised bill returned to the House for reconciliation, it was rejected.
By the time the next Congress assembled in December 1819, the Missouri debate had become a national issue. In the House, another bill was submitted requesting statehood for Missouri, and Congressman John W. Taylor of New York submitted an amendment requiring slavery to be banned in Missouri for it to become a state. Meanwhile, a second bill had been introduced requesting statehood for the Maine Territory, which prohibited slavery.
As the Missouri bill was debated in the House, the Senate passed a bill granting statehood to Maine only if Missouri was also granted statehood without any restrictions on slavery. Maine’s fate now depended on Missouri’s. The Maine-Missouri bill stalled in the Senate until Kentucky Senator Henry Clay seized the opportunity for compromise.
Clay persuaded the debating factions to approve granting statehood to both Maine and Missouri. As a concession to slaveholding states, Missouri would have no slavery restrictions. Thus, one slave and one free state would be added to the Union, maintaining the balance between North and South in Congress. As a concession to the free states, slavery would be prohibited north of Missouri’s southern border, the 36-30 line, in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory.
The Senate passed the bill, but the House rejected the compromise because Maine’s potential statehood depended on Missouri’s fate. The House instead passed two separate bills granting statehood to both Maine and Missouri without conditions for either. The House retained the Senate amendment banning slavery north of the 36-30 line. The Senate approved the bills, and they were signed into law by President James Monroe in 1820.
The so-called Missouri Compromise pacified most slave and non-slave factions, but some were still dissatisfied. Former President Thomas Jefferson considered the compromise “as the knell of the Union… 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.” Sure enough, the Mexican-American War two decades later prompted a new sectional crisis.
While territory acquired from Mexico was not subject to the terms of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was. This created the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, and although both were north of the slavery boundary line, the act allowed the people in those territories to decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery. This effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise.
Three years later, the Supreme Court officially declared that the Missouri Compromise was illegal in the controversial Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. The Court ruled that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories, which it had attempted to do under the compromise. This effectively opened all territory to slavery expansion, thus irreparably dividing North and South and effectively shoving the country toward civil war.
