Missouri Compromise (1820)

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MISSOURI COMPROMISE (1820)

The Missouri Compromise provided a simple constitutional and geographical expedient for resolving a crisis of the Union growing out of slavery's expansion into the western territories. Because the compromise formed the basis of a balance of the free and slave states in the Union for a generation, its abrogation in the 1850s destabilized the constitutional system and intensified the disruption of the Union.

In 1819, Representative James Tallmadge of New York offered an amendment to the Missouri statehood enabling bill that would prohibit the further introduction of slavery into Missouri and would free all children born to slaves after the state's admission, but hold them in servitude until age 25. Free-state congressmen supported congressional power thus to restrict the admission of Missouri by arguments derived from four constitutional sources: the new states clause of Article IV, section 3, giving Congress discretionary authority to admit new states into the Union; the territories clause of the same article and section, empowering Congress to make "Regulations respecting the Territory" of the nation; the slave trade clause of Article I, section 9, permitting congress to control the "Migration" of persons; and the guarantee clause of Article IV, section 4, which required all states to have a republican form of government. Supporters of the Tallmadge amendment, citing the declaration of independence, argued that slavery was incompatible with republican government.

Opponents of the Tallmadge amendment rejected all these arguments, insisting particularly that the logical implications of the republicanism argument would subvert slavery in the states where it already existed. The first Missouri crisis was resolved by a package of statutes that admitted Missouri without the Tallmadge restriction, admitted Maine as a free state, and prohibited the introduction of slavery into the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of Missouri's southern boundary. This compromise was subsequently supplemented by an informal process of admitting paired free and slave states, thus preserving a balance between the sections in the senate.

On the eve of its statehood Missouri precipitated the second crisis by adopting provisions in its new constitution that would have prohibited the abolition of slavery without the consent of slaveholders and that required the state legislature to prohibit the ingress of free blacks. Constitutional arguments over the second controversy turned on the privileges and immunities clause of Article IV, section 2, which introduced the question of the constitutional status of free black people. This issue went unresolved because the compromise that settled the second crisis simply provided that nothing Missouri might do in legislative compliance with the constitutional mandate should be construed to deny any citizen a privilege or immunity to which he was entitled, a toothless provision that Missouri flouted in 1847 by excluding free blacks.

thomas jefferson warned at the time that "a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated." His somber prediction was fulfilled in the 1850s. The wilmot proviso of 1846, which would have prohibited the introduction of slavery into territories acquired as a result of the Mexican War, inaugurated a period of controversy that terminated in the destruction of the Union in 1860. Democrats and southern political leaders in 1848 began to insist that the first Missouri restriction was unconstitutional and to demand its repeal. Repeal was accomplished by the kansas-nebraska act of 1854; and Chief Justice roger b. taney gratuitously held that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional all along in his opinion in dred scott v. sandford (1857). Yet during Secession Winter, Senator john j. crittenden resurrected the Missouri Compromise as the centerpiece of his compromise proposals, which recommended extrapolating the Missouri line all the way to the Pacific. But by 1860 sectional developments had made the constitutional settlement of 1820 obsolete.

William M. Wiecek
(1986)