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Missouri Compromise | HearLore
— Ch. 1 · Era of Good Feelings Context —
Missouri Compromise.
~15 min read · Ch. 1 of 7
In 1819, the United States stood on a precipice that no one had anticipated. The Era of Good Feelings, associated with President James Monroe's administration from 1817 to 1825, was characterized by the dissolution of national political identities. Federalists had been discredited by the Hartford Convention against the War of 1812 and were in decline nationally. The amalgamated or hybridized Republicans adopted key Federalist economic programs and institutions, further erasing party identities and consolidating their victory. Most Republicans like former President James Madison readily acknowledged the shift that had taken place within the Republican party towards Federalist principles and viewed the process without qualms. The phrase 'Era of Good Feelings' so inextricably associated with the administration of James Monroe became a term for this period of apparent unity. But as the Federalists gave up the ghost, everybody began to call himself a Republican. A new theory of party amalgamation preached the doctrine that party division was bad and that a one-party system best served the national interest. Only gradually did it become apparent that in victory, the Republican party had lost its identity and its usefulness. As the party of the whole nation, it ceased to be responsive to any particular elements in its constituency. It ceased to be responsive to the North. When it did become unresponsive, and because it did, it invited the Missouri crisis of 1819, 1820. With the Federalists discredited, the Republicans took up Federalist positions on a number of the great public issues of the day, sweeping all before them as they did. The economic nationalism of the Era of Good Feelings authorized the Tariff of 1816 and incorporated the Second Bank of the United States. This portended an abandonment of the Jeffersonian political formula for strict construction of the Constitution, a limited central government, and commitments to the primacy of Southern agrarian interests. The insistence that slavery was uniquely a Southern concern, not to be touched by outsiders, had been from the outset a sine qua non for Southern participation in national politics. It underlay the Constitution and its creation of a government of limited powers. The end of opposition parties also meant the end of party discipline and the means to suppress internecine factional animosities. Rather than produce political harmony, as President James Monroe had hoped, amalgamation had led to intense rivalries among Democratic-Republicans. Animosity between Federalists and Republicans had been replaced by animosity between Republicans themselves, often over the same issues that had once separated them from the Federalists. It was amid that period's good feelings during which Democratic-Republican Party discipline was in abeyance that the Tallmadge Amendment surfaced.
Tallmadge Amendment Origins
Representative James Tallmadge Jr., a Democratic-Republican from New York, submitted two amendments to Missouri's request for statehood on the 13th of February 1819. A political outsider, the 41-year-old Tallmadge conceived his amendment based on a strong personal aversion to slavery. He had played a leading role in accelerating the emancipation of the remaining slaves in New York in 1817 and had campaigned against Illinois's Black Codes. Though ostensibly free-soil, the new state had a constitution that permitted indentured servitude and a limited form of slavery. Tallmadge tossed a bombshell into the Era of Good Feelings with these amendments. The House Committee of the Whole voted to link Tallmadge's provisions with the Missouri statehood legislation by 79, 67. When each of the restrictionist provisions was put to the vote, they passed along sectional lines: 87 to 76 for prohibition on further slave migration into Missouri and 82 to 78 for emancipating the offspring of slaves at 25. Northern Jeffersonian Republicans formed a coalition across factional lines with remnants of the Federalists. Southern Jeffersonians united in almost unanimous opposition. The ensuing debates pitted the northern restrictionists, antislavery legislators who wished to bar slavery from the Louisiana Territory and all future states and territories, and southern anti-restrictionists, proslavery legislators who rejected any interference by Congress that inhibited slavery expansion. A signatory to the US Constitution, Rufus King of New York, revived his critique as a complaint that New England and the Mid-Atlantic States suffered unduly from the federal ratio and declared himself degraded politically inferior to the slaveholders. King explicitly abjured wanting to benefit either slaves or free blacks. His goal, rather, was to ward off the political subjugation of the older northeastern states, and to protect what he called 'the common defense, the general welfare, and [the] wise administration of government.' Only later did King and other Federalists begin pursuing broader moral and constitutional indictments of slavery. Republican James Tallmadge Jr. and the Missouri restrictionists deplored the federal ratio because it had translated into political supremacy for the South. They had no agenda to remove it from the Constitution but only to prevent its further application west of the Mississippi River. Tallmadge remarked the trans-Mississippi region 'had no claim to such unequal representation, unjust upon the other States.' As determined as southern Republicans were to secure Missouri statehood with slavery, the federal clause ratio failed to provide the margin of victory in the 15th Congress. Blocked by northern Republicans, largely on egalitarian grounds, with sectional support from Federalists, the statehood bill died in the Senate, where the federal ratio had no relevance.
Constitutional Power Struggles
The debates over the Tallmadge Amendment raised questions concerning the interpretation of the republic's founding documents. Jeffersonian Republicans justified Tallmadge's restrictions on the grounds that Congress possessed the authority to impose territorial statutes that would remain in force after statehood was established. Representative John W. Taylor pointed to Indiana and Illinois, where their free state status conformed to antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance. Further, antislavery legislators invoked Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which requires states to provide a republican form of government. As the Louisiana Territory was not part of the United States in 1787, they argued that introducing slavery into Missouri would thwart the egalitarian intent of the Founders. According to the Republicans, preservation of individual rights and strict construction of the Constitution demanded the limitation of slavery and the recognition, in Fuller's words, that 'all men have equal rights,' regardless of color. Earlier and more passionately than the Federalists, Republicans rooted their antislavery arguments, not in political expediency, but in egalitarian morality, the belief, as Fuller declared, that it was both 'the right and duty of Congress' to restrict the spread 'of the intolerable evil and the crying enormity of slavery.' Individual rights, the Republicans asserted, has been defined by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, 'an authority admitted in all parts of the Union [as] a definition of the basis of republican government.' If all men were created equal, as Jefferson said, then slaves, as men, were born free and, under any truly republican government, entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Proslavery Republicans countered that the Constitution had long been interpreted as having relinquished any claim to restricting slavery in the states. The free inhabitants of Missouri in the territorial phase or during statehood had the right to establish or disestablish slavery without interference from the federal government. As to the Northwest Ordinance, southerners denied that it could serve as a lawful antecedent for the territories of the Louisiana Purchase, as the ordinance had been issued under the Articles of Confederation, rather than the US Constitution. When slaveholders embraced Jeffersonian constitutional strictures on a limited central government, they were reminded that Jefferson, as president in 1803, had deviated from those precepts by wielding federal executive power to double the size of the United States, including the lands under consideration for Missouri statehood. In doing so, he set a constitutional precedent that would serve to rationalize Tallmadge's federally imposed slavery restrictions.
Senate Balance of Power
Northern majorities in the House did not translate into political dominance. The fulcrum for proslavery forces resided in the Senate, where constitutional compromise in 1787 had provided for two senators per state, regardless of its population. The South, with its smaller free population than the North, benefited from that arrangement. Since 1815, sectional parity in the Senate had been achieved through paired admissions, which left the North and the South, during the application of Missouri Territory, at 11 states each. The central concern in the debates... had been over the senatorial balance of power, for the Southern congressmen had concentrated their objections upon the fact that the admission of Missouri would forever destroy the equal balance then existing between [the number of] free and slave states. The Senate stood as the bulwark and source of the Slave Power, which required admission of slave states to the Union to preserve its national primacy. At stake were the terms of admission to the Union of the newest state, Missouri. The main issue seemed simple enough, but the ramifications were not. In 1818, when Illinois gained admission to the Union, antislavery forces won a state constitution that formally barred slavery but included a fierce legal code that regulated free blacks and permitted the election of two Southern-born senators. In practical terms, were Missouri admitted as a slave state, the Southern bloc in the Senate might enjoy a four-vote, not a two-vote majority. The three-fifths clause guaranteed the South a voting majority on some, but hardly all critical matters. Indeed, the congressional bulwark of what became known, rightly, as the Slave Power proved not to be the House, but the Senate, where the three-fifths rule made no difference. The three-fifths clause certainly did not prevent the House from voting to exclude slavery from the new state of Missouri in 1819. The House twice passed by substantial margins, antislavery resolutions proposed by Tallmadge with the largely Northern Republican majority founding its case on Jefferson's Declaration. The antislavery effort would die in the Senate, where, again, the three-fifths clause made no difference. If slavery were on the road to ultimate extinction in Missouri, the state might not vote with the proslavery bloc. In such power calculations, the composition of the Senate was of even greater moment than that of the House. So the South looked to preserve its sectional equality in the Senate.
Henry Clay's Legislative Maneuvering
Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, in a desperate bid to break the deadlock, divided the Senate bills. Clay and his pro-compromise allies succeeded in pressuring half of the anti-restrictionist Southerners in the House to submit to the passage of the Thomas proviso and maneuvered a number of restrictionist northerners in the House to acquiesce in supporting Missouri as a slave state. Brown noted that Henry Clay managed to bring up the separate parts of the compromise separately in the House, enabling the Old Republicans in the South to provide him with a margin of victory on the closely contested Missouri statehood bill while saved their pride by voting against the Thomas Proviso. The Senate decided to connect the two measures. It passed a bill for the admission of Maine with an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to form a state constitution. Before the bill was returned to the House, a second amendment was adopted, on the motion of Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, to exclude slavery from the Louisiana Territory north of the latitude 36°30' north, the southern boundary of Missouri, except within the limits of the proposed state of Missouri. The vote in the Senate was 24-20 for the compromise. The amendment and the bill passed in the Senate on February 17 and the 18th of February 1820. The House then approved the Senate compromise amendment, 90, 87, with all of the opposition coming from representatives from the free states. The House then approved the whole bill 134, 42 with opposition from the southern states. Under the influence of Kentucky Representative Henry Clay, who became known as 'The Great Compromiser', an act of admission was finally passed that the exclusionary clause of the Missouri constitution should never be construed to authorize the passage of any law impairing the privileges and immunities of any U.S. citizen. That deliberately ambiguous provision is sometimes known as the Second Missouri Compromise. The two houses were at odds on the issue of the legality of slavery but also on the parliamentary question of the inclusion of Maine and Missouri in the same bill. The committee recommended the enactment of two laws, one for the admission of Maine and the other an enabling act for Missouri. It also recommended having no restrictions on slavery but keeping the Thomas Amendment. Both houses agreed, and the measures were passed on the 5th of March 1820, and signed by President James Monroe on March 6.
Federalist Conspiracy Theories
The Missouri Compromise debates stirred suspicions by slavery interests that the underlying purpose of the Tallmadge Amendments had little to do with opposition to the expansion of slavery. The accusation was first leveled in the House by the Republican anti-restrictionist John Holmes from the District of Maine. He suggested that Senator Rufus King's warm support for the Tallmadge Amendment concealed a conspiracy to organize a new antislavery party in the North, which would be composed of old Federalists in combination with disaffected antislavery Republicans. The fact that King in the Senate and Tallmadge and Tyler in the House, all New Yorkers, were among the vanguard for restriction on slavery in Missouri lent credibility to those charges. When King was re-elected to the US Senate in January 1820, during the 16th Congress debates and with bipartisan support, suspicions deepened and persisted throughout the crisis. President Monroe and other Republicans were convinced that behind the attempt to exclude slavery from Missouri was a carefully concealed plot to revive the party divisions of the past either openly as Federalism or some new disguise. He drew his conclusion from several circumstances. Rufus King had emerged as the outstanding congressional spokesman of the restrictionists and that he was in league with De Witt Clinton who was pursuing his own presidential ambitions outside the Republican Party. To Monroe's way of thinking, the real objective of these leaders was power... that they were willing to accept disunion if their plans could not be achieved in any other fashion. Tallmadge was one of Clinton's close associates added weight to his suspicions. The union could not survive the formation of parties based on a North-South sectional alignment. Southern Jeffersonian Republican leadership, including President Monroe and ex-President Thomas Jefferson, considered it as an article of faith that Federalists, given the chance, would destabilize the Union as to restore monarchical rule in North America and consolidate political control over the people by expanding the functions of the federal government. Jefferson, at first unperturbed by the Missouri question, soon became convinced that a northern conspiracy was afoot, with Federalists and crypto-Federalists posing as Republicans and using Missouri statehood as a pretext. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts surmised that the political configuration for just such a sectional party already existed. Consolidation was the new term that Jefferson embraced, other Virginians were using it too, to label the covert goals of these alleged conspirators. In one sense the consolidations were simply the old monarchists in slightly different guise. A flawed explanation of the political forces that had mobilized around the Missouri Question suspected of being organized to maximize its coercive influence over popular opinion.
Repeal and Civil War Legacy
The provisions of the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30' north were effectively repealed by Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas, Nebraska Act of 1854. The repeal of the Compromise caused outrage in the North and sparked the return to politics of Abraham Lincoln, who criticized slavery and excoriated Douglas's act in his Peoria Speech on the 16th of October 1854. For decades afterward, most Americans hailed the 1820 agreement as an essential compromise, almost on the sacred level of the Constitution itself. Although the Civil War eventually broke out in 1861, historians often say that the Compromise helped postpone the war. In an April 22 letter to John Holmes, former President Thomas Jefferson wrote that while the compromise defused tensions in the short term, the regional division of the country created by the Compromise Line would eventually lead to the destruction of the Union. The debate over the admission of Missouri also raised the issue of sectional balance, as the country was equally divided between slave states and free states, with eleven each. To admit Missouri as a slave state would tip the balance in the Senate, which is made up of two senators per state, in favor of the slave states. That made northern states want Maine admitted as a free state. Maine was admitted in 1820, and Missouri in 1821. The trend of admitting a new free or slave state to balance the status of previous ones would continue up until the Compromise of 1850. The next state to be admitted would be Arkansas slave state in 1836, quickly followed by Michigan free state in 1837. In 1845, two slave states Texas and Florida were admitted, which was countered by the free states of Iowa and Wisconsin in 1846 and 1848. Four more free and no more slave states would be admitted before the outbreak of the Civil War. From the constitutional standpoint, the Missouri Compromise was important as an example of the congressional exclusion of slavery from US territory acquired since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Nevertheless, the Compromise was deeply disappointing to blacks in the South, as it stopped the Southern progression of gradual emancipation at Missouri's southern border, and it legitimized slavery as a Southern institution. The compromise both delayed the Civil War and sowed its seeds; at that time, Thomas Jefferson predicted the line as drawn would someday tear the Union apart. Forty years later, the North and South would split closely along the 36°30' parallel and launch the Civil War.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was federal legislation passed on the 6th of March 1820 that admitted Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state while prohibiting slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of latitude 36°30'.
Who proposed the Tallmadge Amendment to restrict slavery in Missouri?
Representative James Tallmadge Jr. from New York submitted the Tallmadge Amendment to Missouri's request for statehood on the 13th of February 1819 to prohibit further migration of slaves into the territory and emancipate offspring at age 25.
When did President James Monroe sign the Missouri Compromise bill?
President James Monroe signed the Missouri Compromise bill on the 6th of March 1820 after both houses agreed to the measures on the 5th of March 1820 following Senate votes on February 17 and 18, 1820.
Why did the South oppose the admission of Missouri as a slave state initially?
Southern congressmen opposed initial restrictions because admitting Missouri without slavery would destroy the equal balance of power between eleven free states and eleven slave states in the Senate where each state received two senators regardless of population.
How was the Kansas Nebraska Act related to the Missouri Compromise?
Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 effectively repealed the provisions of the Missouri Compromise that forbade slavery north of latitude 36°30' which caused outrage in the North and sparked political activity by Abraham Lincoln.