The Missouri Compromise, Research Paper Example

During the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson, a immense geographical area east of the Mississippi River was purchased by the United States from the nation of France. This territory was known as the Louisiana Purchase which doubled the size of the country and stretched from present-day Missouri westward to New Mexico, and from the southern border of Canada southward to New Orleans. Sometime later during the Presidency of James Monroe, territories that once belonged to the Louisiana Purchase began to seek permission to become U.S. states and to join the Union. One of these was Missouri which in 1820 was a slave state, meaning that it allowed human slavery within its geographical borders. However, certain members of the United States Congress, especially Henry Clay of Kentucky who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives, “feared that the admission of Missouri as a U.S. state would tip the tenuous balance in the Senate in favor of pro-slavery interests.” In other words, the U.S. Senate was concerned that admitting Missouri as a slave state would encourage other territories in the former Louisiana Purchase to become slave states.

Therefore, in order to prevent the upset of the balance related to slave and non-slave states, the U.S. Congress devised what came to be known as the Missouri Compromise which allowed Missouri to become a slave state but mandated that Maine (formerly part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) must remain a free state or a state without human slavery. This compromise also mandated that all new states that were geographically located below the 36/30 parallel, being the extreme southern border of Missouri, would be permitted to have slavery, while all new states above the parallel or north of Missouri must be kept slave-free. In effect, this second part of the compromise maintained the “uneasy balance in the Senate and

helped to avert a national crisis.” However, former President Thomas Jefferson, noted shortly after the passage of the Missouri Compromise that it had “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” due to considering it “at once as the knell of the Union,” ² a reference to the breakup of the Union which ironically did occur some forty years later with the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.

According to Robert Pierce Forbes, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, along with allowing slavery in states like Missouri, also affected the issue of slavery in the American West which at the time was wide open territory that had been explored by the Lewis and Clark Expedition some fifteen years earlier. On February 13, 1819, the citizens of Missouri requested permission from the U.S. House of Representatives “to create a new state constitution to form the Missouri government and to become a member of the Union.”

However, New York State Representative James Tallmadge apparently foresaw the future and created an amendment that disallowed Missouri to add more slaves after a certain date and which mandated that “every black child born in Missouri after statehood must be made a free citizen after attaining the age of twenty-five.” ⁴ This amendment was later adopted and place within the Compromise itself by the House of Representatives. But unfortunately, the U.S. Senate “refused to consider the amendment as a constitutional device which led to the amendment being discarded.”

About a year later, the House of Representatives decided to attempt to pass a similar bill to Tallmadge’s amendment. This was sponsored by John W. Taylor, also of New York State, whose amendment would allow Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state. However, things began to heat up considerably when Alabama was admitted to the Union as a slave state which brought slave and free states to about an equal number in the Union. All of this was complicated by the fact that Maine decided to remain as a free state which upset the balance of equality related to the number of free states and slave states in the country.

The U.S. Senate then came together and made the decision to join Tallmadge’s and Taylor’s amendment as one which in effect would allow the citizens of Missouri to create their own state constitution and charter. But then another bill was introduced in the Senate by Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, a longtime foe of slavery. This bill mandated that slavery would not be allowed in any of the territory that once formed the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36/30 parallel or the southern boundary line of Missouri.

Following all of this, the U.S. Senate voted on the Missouri Compromise with twenty-four in favor and twenty in opposition. Thus, in February of 1820, the Missouri Compromise was passed by the Senate. Shortly afterwards, the House of Representatives “approved of the Compromise by voting ninety in favor to eighty-seven in opposition.” As might be suspected, the eighty-seven votes in opposition were from state representatives opposed to slavery in Missouri

As the years passed, the Missouri Compromise created a number of heated debates that have endured into the 21st century. As noted by Forbes, these debates “were mostly centered on competition between the North and the South for power in the U.S. Congress” ⁸ and for the ability to decide the fate of future states related to slavery.

Bibliography

Forbes, Robert Pierce. The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

“The Missouri Compromise.” Civil War Trust. Accessed April 4, 2015. http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/the-missouri-compromise.html.