Missouri Compromise

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MISSOURI COMPROMISE

The Missouri Compromise (actually a set of congressional acts passed in 1820 and 1821) settled the sectional crisis triggered by Missouri's application to join the Union as a slave state. It permitted this while prohibiting slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30?. This legislation established the policy for the admission of future states for the next thirty years.

The crisis began when, on 13 February 1819, about three weeks before the adjournment of the Fifteenth Congress, New York Representative James Tallmadge introduced an amendment to the Missouri statehood bill to bar the importation of new slaves and emancipated at adulthood those already in the territory. Tallmadge's amendment sparked an explosive reaction from southern congressmen, particularly from border states, such as Virginia, which looked to the new territories as a market for their dangerous surplus of slaves. This outburst surprised many Northerners, who had accepted at face value Southern, and especially Virginian, avowals of anti-slavery sentiment. After an intense debate employing nearly all the arguments that would be made for and against slavery until the Civil War, the House, by a narrow margin, passed the Missouri bill with the slavery restrictions on 16 February 1819. New York Congressman John W. Taylor's proposal to restrict slavery in the adjacent territory of Arkansas was defeated three days later, and his subsequent proposal to bar slavery in the territory north of 36° 30? never received a vote. The Senate struck out the antislavery provisions of the Missouri bill, but the House stuck by them, leaving the question unresolved when Congress adjourned on 4 March.

Despite the fury of the congressional debates, the Missouri dispute initially attracted little attention in the nation at large, being overshadowed by the Supreme Court's decision in McCulloch v. Maryland and a sharp economic recession. Spurred by Federalist activists, including New York editor Theodore Dwight and venerable New Jersey philanthropist Elias Boudinot, Northern antislavery (and anti-Southern) sentiment strengthened over the subsequent months. Incited by anti-Missouri meetings throughout the free states, virtually all Northern state legislatures voted—usually unanimously—to instruct their congressional delegations to oppose the expansion of slavery. Public opinion in the South, on the other hand, was much more muted.

When Maine (then part of Massachusetts) applied for statehood, Virginia Senator James Barbour sought to use it for leverage in brokering a compromise. On New Year's Day 1820, President Monroe and Barbour explained the plan to Maine congressman John Holmes, who reported to Maine's top political leaders that administration leaders felt that "the Mother should have twins this time." However, the proposed linkage detonated explosive responses in both North and South. Maine's citizens were outraged by their representatives' apparent acquiescence to a move to tie the admission of their state to the extension of slavery, while Virginia leaders angrily reacted to the suggestion floated by President Monroe that he might endorse the proposal by Indiana senator Jesse Thomas to bar slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of 36° 30?—the identical line proposed the year before by antislavery advocate Taylor, now Speaker of the House.

In the face of this surge of outrage from both sections, Monroe abruptly backed away from expressions of compromise, avowing privately to Virginians that he would give up the presidency before supporting restrictions on slavery and explaining his earlier stance as a desperate response to extreme danger to the Republic. Monroe and his associates began to advise receptive Southerners and stalwart Northern Republicans that the campaign to restrict slavery in Missouri was really a cynical ploy by Federalists to regain power by appealing to Americans' humanitarian impulses. Cabinet officials and other influential administration allies, most notably Thomas Jefferson, spread the message that only the selfless statesmanship of anti-restrictionist politicians, such as Maine's Holmes, could save the Union from the machinations of northern conspirators. New York governor DeWitt Clinton and Senator Rufus King were portrayed as the architects of an electoral coup that would oust Monroe from the presidential mansion and close the West to slavery, thus insuring that Upper South planters would be "damned up in a land of slaves," as one Virginian put it. This fanciful scenario gained some plausibility from the facts that Clinton was a cousin of Tallmadge, author of the restriction amendment, and that King's half-brother and two sons, all of whom had close ties to Republican leaders, implicitly endorsed the damaging charges against their kinsman by their silence.

The deadlock in Congress continued through February, although restrictionist unity showed growing cracks. While their constituents overwhelmingly continued to oppose the admission of Missouri with slavery, Northern congressmen began to waver in the face of charges of Federalist plotting, Southern threats to withdraw from the Union, and "the influence of the Palace." To secure support from recalcitrant Northerners, the president and his associates employed moral suasion, bullying and removals, political favors and lucrative public offices. A close reading of contemporary accounts reveals James Monroe as a master of persuasion, but most discreet. Despite his activism, Monroe's historical image remains that of a cautious strict constructionist.

On 12 February, when pro- and anti-restriction sentiment reached a fever pitch, Senator Rufus King took the floor of the Senate and delivered an antislavery speech so stinging that, according to John Quincy Adams, slaveholders "gnawed their lips and clenched their fists as they heard him." King repudiated "all laws and compacts" supporting slavery as "absolutely void, because contrary to the law of nature." Thus did he solidify his reputation as the South's most dangerous foe. Four days later the Senate approved the Thomas Amendment, barring slavery above 36° 30?. On 2 March, after three weeks of furiously escalating rhetoric and action (including fervent nationalist Henry Clay's declaration that he would "go home and raise troops, if necessary"), the House voted 90 to 87 to strike the slavery restriction from the Missouri statehood bill, and 134 to 42 to accept the compromise line. "I consider myself and associates as conquered," Rufus King lamented. "The slave States, with their free corps, have subdued us." Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, an opponent of compromise, nonetheless exulted that the South considered it "a great triumph." Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, after a discussion with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, portentously observed of slaveholders, "The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls."

However, not all opponents of slavery were mournful, nor perhaps had slaveholders betrayed all their secrets. Speaker Taylor wrote to his wife, "We have gained all that was possible, if not all that was desired," calling the outcome "an ample recompense for all the time and labour it has cost us." The author of the original restriction, James Tallmadge, wrote his colleague Taylor that news of the vote "gives great Joy," adding, "You have in this business a monument to your fame." After receiving a unanimous opinion from his cabinet that the bill passed constitutional muster, President Monroe signed it on 4 March 1820.

Many Northerners, however, continued to oppose statehood for Missouri, and the July 1820 draft constitution of the territory, which barred free blacks and mulattos from the state, gave opponents the grounds they needed to reopen the controversy: they viewed the measure as an unconstitutional violation of the rights of black citizens of other states under the rights and privileges clause (Art. IV, Sec. 2) of the Constitution. The opening of the Seventeenth Congress witnessed another fractious stalemate, mirroring the previous year's discord. In the end, Henry Clay led a hand-picked joint House-Senate committee in drafting a deliberately ambiguous resolution declaring that the antiblack clause in Missouri's constitution should never be construed as violating the constitutional rights of any citizen. Though in fact designed to be construed differently in different sections, this language, if interpreted consistently, implied that either Missouri's restriction was in fact unconstitutional or black citizens of other states affected by it were not citizens of the federal government. Although, as a New Hampshire newspaper bitterly observed, "a child might penetrate the flimsiness of the evasion" inherent in the compromise language, the exhausted House members narrowly adopted Clay's compromise on 26 February 1821 and a week later voted to admit Missouri to statehood.

It is not clear how much the election of John Quincy Adams in 1824 was influenced by the controversy. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 and the rise of the Democratic Party constituted setbacks to the policy of containing slavery, which the compromise was designed to promote. Yet the Arkansas statehood bill (1836) generated a nearly equal sectional showdown between the House and Senate, as did the Wilmot Proviso a decade later, demonstrating the continued explosiveness of the slavery issue. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 galvanized antislavery sentiment and spurred the formation of the Republican Party. The Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott that the compromise was unconstitutional helped to trigger the Civil War. Thus if the short-term impact of the Missouri Compromise is difficult to assess, in the long run it must be viewed as a decisive setback to slavery and the cornerstone of a later free-state majority.

bibliography

Brown, Everett S. The Missouri Compromises and Presidential Politics, 1820–1825: From the Letters of William Plumer, Jr., Representative of New Hampshire. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1926.

Brown, Richard H. "The Missouri Crisis, Slavery, and the Politics of Jacksonianism." South Atlantic Quarterly 65 (winter 1966): 55–72.

Dangerfield, George. The Era of Good Feelings. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1952.

Fehrenbacher, Don E. The South and Three Sectional Crises. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Forbes, Robert P. "Slavery and the Meaning of America, 1819–1833." Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994.

Moore, Glover. The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1953.

Shoemaker, Floyd. Missouri's Struggle for Statehood, 1804–1821. Jefferson City, Mo.: Hugh Stevens, 1916.

Robert P. Forbes

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation