Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Clay’s compromise emphasized that after Missouri became a state, none of its rights would be impaired, including the right “to exclude from her jurisdictions persons under peculiar circumstances, (such as paupers, vagabonds, &c.,).”18 The compromise thus affirmed the right of Missouri (or any state) to “exclude” people it deemed undesirable in conventional poor-law categories. It reinforced distinctions between “citizens” and “paupers,” suggesting that insofar as state authorities construed free Black people as paupers, vagrants, drains on public resources, and so on, they might be excludable. Moreover, the compromise did not require Missouri to change its constitution, and it did not challenge a state’s authority to make laws targeting Black people as a suspect class. It did not venture a definition of United States citizenship or affirm that African Americans were US citizens, nor did it define the “privileges and immunities” of state citizenship. Congress left all those matters unresolved.