Missouri Compromise

By: Frank Towers

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Missouri Compromise

The Missouri Compromise brought Missouri into the Union in 1821 as a slave state but also established a line in federally held territory north of which slavery would be prohibited. In addition, the compromise sought to define the citizenship rights of free blacks.

Although the architects of the compromise aimed to eliminate political conflict over slavery, the debate engendered by Missouri's admission to the Union showed that slavery would continue to disrupt American politics. While the Missouri Compromise furthered the oppression of African Americans by spreading slavery to new territory, it also strengthened the support of whites in the North for an end to slavery's expansion, if not outright abolition; the North's commitment to free soil—land where slavery was outlawed—ultimately led that region to join in the struggle for emancipation and fight the Civil War in the 1860s.

The status of slavery in land acquired through the Louisiana Purchase had been an issue of contention since the acquisition of the territory from France in 1803. Because slavery had been legal in Louisiana under French rule, northern antislavery congressmen worried that slavery would persist in new states carved from that territory. Settlement patterns reinforced that fear: the slave states of the Upper South provided most of the migrants to the rich soils near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, which would become the state of Missouri. In 1820 most of Missouri's eleven thousand slaves and fifty-five thousand free people had migrated from Kentucky, Virginia, and other southern states. Slaveholding sons of eastern planters bought up the best land, controlled the top public offices, and helped steer white public opinion toward support for slavery.

In December 1818, having crossed the required thresholds of land, population, and local government, the territory of Missouri applied for statehood. The New York congressman James Tallmadge Jr. proposed an amendment to the Missouri statehood bill banning the importation of slaves and indentured servants into Missouri and emancipating all slaves born in the state on their twenty-fifth birthdays. On 15 February 1819 the House of Representatives voted along regional lines, seventy-nine to sixty-seven, to accept Tallmadge's amendment. The bill then went to the Senate, where slave states held half the seats. Despite the antislavery arguments of the New York senator Rufus King, the Senate stripped the Tallmadge amendment from the Missouri bill and returned it to the House. A deadlock ensued when the northern majority in the House refused to admit Missouri without the antislavery amendment.

The debate over Missouri consumed the attention of both Congress and the press. Antislavery northerners flooded Congress with petitions to ban slavery from Missouri. African Americans took special interest in the issue; free blacks living in Washington, D.C., crammed the galleries of the House and Senate to hear the debates, which they well understood would have an impact on the future of slavery as well as on African American civil rights in general. On the other side, proslavery politicians articulated arguments about states' rights and the positive aspects of slavery, all of which would be recycled in future regional debates. Southern whites prefigured later secessionist arguments by threatening to quit the Union should they be denied the right to take slaves into Missouri.

Meanwhile, in 1819 a narrow House majority approved a plan to permit slavery in the newly formed Arkansas Territory—land left over from the old Missouri Territory encompassing the present-day states of Arkansas and Oklahoma. A solution to the Missouri deadlock emerged from the Arkansas discussion: although a majority of northern congressmen voted against slavery in Arkansas, enough support was given to legalize human bondage in the new territory. Northerners who accepted slavery in Arkansas but opposed it in Missouri did so because they believed that slavery should be banned only from the northern latitudes. They pointed out that Missouri was even with states of the Old Northwest, which had been set aside as free soil in 1787, whereas Arkansas, with a northern border of latitude 36°30′, was situated below that line. The Arkansas debate initiated talk of a compromise that would keep slavery out of federal territory above the 36°30′ line.

That compromise was enacted in 1820 in an amendment to a bill creating the new free state of Maine, which had broken away from Massachusetts. The amendment, proposed by the Illinois senator Jesse B. Thomas, a slaveholder of southern origin, narrowly passed the Senate in another regionally divided vote. The House passed the compromise after voting separately to allow Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state. Missouri won admission with the support of all southern Congressmen and eighteen northerners who either abstained or voted for slavery in Missouri. Northern foes of the compromise called these eighteen elected officials “doughfaces” to suggest that their opinions were molded by others. The admission of Maine and Missouri preserved an equal balance between slave-state and free-state representation in the U.S. Senate, where each state holds two seats. That balance would be maintained until the 1850s.

Controversy over Missouri was renewed in 1821 because the Missouri constitution banned migration into the state by free blacks and mulattoes. This ban outraged northerners, who, despite racist laws in their own states, regarded Missouri's law as a violation of African American citizenship rights. Henry Clay, a Kentucky slaveholder and the outgoing Speaker of the House, engineered a second compromise that required the Missouri constitution to protect all rights guaranteed to citizens by the U.S. Constitution. Northerners objected to the proposal because it failed to explicitly mention free blacks. After another round of sharp debate and protest, Congress and Missouri accepted this compromise.

For African Americans the Missouri Compromise was both a victory and a defeat. On the positive side, from the compromise African Americans gained the ban on slavery above 36°30′; furthermore, the vigorous opposition of northern congressmen to slavery's expansion showed that northern whites would at least help African Americans fight for free soil, if not for universal emancipation and equal rights. As one example of the North's stiffening resolve, in 1820 the Pennsylvania state legislature passed a strong antikidnapping law immediately after Congress passed the original Missouri Compromise. For years slave catchers had preyed upon free blacks living just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, which defined the boundary between free Pennsylvania and slave Maryland. Pennsylvania's 1820 statute made the work of slave catchers more difficult by severely punishing those who kidnapped free blacks and by forbidding justices of the peace and aldermen from administering the federal Fugitive Slave Law.

The Missouri Compromise also represented a defeat for the African Americans, however, in that slavery had spread to Missouri. In addition, the national debates had brought about the increased unity of southern whites in their support for slavery and their intensifying suspicion of anyone—free blacks, northern whites, or southern slaves—who might threaten the institution.

Shortly after the passage of the Missouri Compromise, whites in Charleston, South Carolina, demonstrated how concerns about northern opposition to slavery's expansion had increased white southerners' fears of slave insurrection. In 1822 Charleston authorities arrested and executed thirty-six African Americans for their involvement in an alleged conspiracy to overthrow slavery and the civil government. At the head of the conspiracy was Denmark Vesey, a free African American and a leader in the independent African Methodist Episcopal Church. Vesey's prosecutors claimed that he had been inspired to revolt after reading the speeches of northern antislavery congressmen in the Missouri debates. Such speeches, proslavery southerners feared, gave potential slave rebels hope that the North would aid them in insurrection. The Missouri controversy also highlighted the threat that free blacks posed to slavery. Congressional debates over whether a state could bar entry to free African Americans had given voice to white southerners' suspicions that free blacks were the agents of slave rebellions. These fears, along with circumstantial evidence that may have reflected a true conspiracy, produced the backlash against Charleston's free African Americans in 1822.

Equally damaging to the cause of freedom was the political principle that eventually brought about the compromise. Henry Clay and his supporters won out by arguing that regional harmony and preservation of the Union needed to be valued over the particular advantages sought by each region. While this notion helped curb some of the gains demanded by slaveholders, it also gave them assurance that some northerners would accede to their proslavery demands rather than risk disunion. In the 1830s new political parties, the Whigs and Democrats, established a new system of electoral competition around economic and cultural issues. Whig and Democratic leaders, including Clay, agreed that regional issues should not disrupt the normal business of government. They pointed to the Missouri crisis as an example of what would befall the nation should voters abandon their loyalty to parties with cross-regional followings. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison grew frustrated with this system of party politics because it put regional harmony above African American human rights.

See also Black Migration; Black Politics; Civil Rights; Constitution, U.S.; Denmark Vesey Conspiracy; Free African Americans to 1828; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Gradual Emancipation; Indentured Servitude; Kidnapping; Laws and Legislation; Riots and Rebellions; Slavery: Upper South; and Vesey, Denmark.

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