The Missouri Compromise (also known as the Compromise of 1820) was federal legislation of the United States that balanced the desires of some northern states to prevent the expansion of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it. It admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and declared a policy of prohibiting slavery in the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36°30′ parallel. The 16th United States Congress passed the legislation on March 3, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March 6, 1820.
Earlier, in February 1819, Representative James Tallmadge Jr., a Democratic-Republican from New York, had submitted two amendments to Missouri's request for statehood that included restrictions on slavery. While the slave states earlier claimed federal protection for slavery, they now objected to any bill that imposed federal restrictions on slavery and claimed that it was a state issue, as settled by the Constitution. However, with the Senate evenly split at the opening of the debates, both sections possessing 11 states, the admission of Missouri as a slave state would give the South an advantage. Northern critics including Federalists and Democratic-Republicans objected to the expansion of slavery into the Louisiana Purchase territory on the Constitutional inequalities of the three-fifths rule, which conferred Southern representation in the federal government derived from a state's slave population.
Northern Democratic-Republicans ardently maintained that a strict interpretation of the Constitution required that Congress act to limit the spread of slavery on egalitarian grounds. "[Northern] Republicans rooted their antislavery arguments, not on expediency, but in egalitarian morality." "The Constitution [said northern Democratic-Republicans], strictly interpreted, gave the sons of the founding generation the legal tools to hasten [the] removal [of slavery], including the refusal to admit additional slave states."
When free-soil Maine offered its petition for statehood, the Senate quickly linked the Maine and Missouri bills, making Maine's admission a condition for Missouri entering the Union as a slave state. Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois added a compromise provision that banned slavery from all remaining lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36° 30' parallel. The combined measures passed the Senate, only to be voted down in the House by Northern representatives who held out for a free Missouri. 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. While the Missouri question in the 15th Congress ended in stalemate on March 4, 1819, with the House sustaining its northern anti-slavery position and the Senate blocking a state that restricted slavery, it succeeded in the 16th Congress.
The Missouri Compromise was controversial. While it mollified most people at the time and settled the issue for more than 20 years, many worried that the country had become lawfully divided along regional and sectarian lines. Tensions resumed in the 1840s and the Compromise of 1850 only briefly defused the situation. The Kansas–Nebraska Act effectively repealed the bill in 1854, and the Supreme Court declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), both of which increased tensions over slavery and contributed to the American Civil War. The compromise both delayed the Civil War and sowed its seeds; in April 1820, 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.
Background
Era of Good Feelings
The Era of Good Feelings, closely associated with the administration of President James Monroe (1817–1825), was characterized by the dissolution of national political identities. With the Federalists discredited by the Hartford Convention against the War of 1812, they were in decline nationally, and the "amalgamated" or hybridized Democratic-Republicans adopted key Federalist economic programs and institutions, further erasing party identities and consolidating their victory.
The economic nationalism of the Era of Good Feelings authorized the Tariff of 1816 and incorporated the Second Bank of the United States, which 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 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.
It was amid that period's "good feelings" during which Democratic-Republican Party discipline was in abeyance that the Tallmadge Amendment surfaced.
Louisiana Purchase and Missouri Territory
The immense Louisiana Purchase territories had been acquired through federal executive action, followed by Democratic-Republican legislative authorization in 1803 under President Thomas Jefferson.
Prior to its purchase in 1803, the governments of Spain and France had already sanctioned and promoted slavery in the region. Enslaved African Americans accounted for twenty to thirty percent of the non-Native American population in and around the main settlements of St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve. In 1804, Congress limited the further introduction of enslaved men and women to those introduced by actual settlers.
In addition, in appointing the officials from the Indiana Territory to Upper Louisiana (as Missouri was known until 1812), Congress heightened concerns that it intended to extend some sort of prohibition on slavery's growth across the river. White Missourians objected to these restrictions, and in 1805, Congress withdrew them. The final version of the 1805 territorial ordinance omitted all references to slavery. Under the 1805 ordinance, slavery existed legally in Missouri (which included all of the Louisiana Purchase outside of Louisiana) by force of local law and territorial statute, rather than by territorial ordinance, as was the case in other territories where slavery was permitted.
It is unknown if Congress purposely omitted any reference to slavery or Article VI in the 1805 territorial ordinance. Nonetheless, over the next fifteen years, some restrictionists – including Amos Stoddard – claimed that this omission was deliberate, intended to allow the United States government to prohibit slavery in Missouri if circumstances proved more favorable in the future.
In 1812, Louisiana, a major cotton producer and the first to be carved from the Louisiana Purchase, had entered the Union as a slave state. Predictably, Missourians were adamant that slave labor should not be molested by the federal government. In the years after the War of 1812, the region, now known as Missouri Territory, experienced rapid settlement, led by slaveholding planters.
Agriculturally, the land in the lower reaches of the Missouri River, from which that new state would be formed, had no prospects as a major cotton producer. Suited for diversified farming, the only crop regarded as promising for slave labor was hemp culture. On that basis, southern planters immigrated with their chattel to Missouri, and the slave population rose from 3,101 in 1810 to 10,000 in 1820. Out of the total population of 67,000, slaves represented about 15%.
By 1819, the population of Missouri Territory was approaching the threshold that would qualify it for statehood. An enabling act was provided to Congress empowering territorial residents to select convention delegates and draft a state constitution. The admission of Missouri Territory as a slave state was expected to be more-or-less routine.
Democratic-Republicans and slavery
The Missouri crisis marked a rupture in the Democratic-Republican ascendency, the national association of Democratic-Republicans that had dominated federal politics since the War of 1812.
The Founding Fathers had inserted both principled and expedient elements in the establishing documents. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 had been grounded on the claim that liberty and equality were linked together as universal human rights. The Revolutionary generation had formed a government of limited powers in 1787 to embody the principles in the Declaration but "burdened with the one legacy that defied the principles of 1776", human bondage. In a pragmatic commitment to form the Union, the federal apparatus would forego any authority to interfere directly with the institution of slavery if it existed under local control by the states. The acknowledgment of state sovereignty provided for the participation of the states that were the most committed to slave labor. With that understanding, slaveholders had co-operated in authorizing the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 and outlawing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. The Founders sanctioned slavery but did so with the implicit understanding that the slave states would take steps to relinquish the institution as opportunities arose.
Southern states, after the American Revolutionary War, had regarded slavery as an institution in decline except for Georgia and South Carolina. That was manifest in the shift towards diversified farming in the Upper South; the gradual emancipation of slaves in New England and more significantly in Mid-Atlantic States. In the 1790s, with the introduction of the cotton gin, to 1815, with the vast increase in demand for cotton internationally, slave-based agriculture underwent an immense revival that spread the institution westward to the Mississippi River. Antislavery elements in the South vacillated, as did their hopes for the imminent demise of human bondage.
However rancorous the disputes were by southerners themselves over the virtues of a slave-based society, they united against external challenges to their institution. They believed that free states were not to meddle in the affairs of slave states. Southern leaders, virtually all of whom identified as Democratic-Republicans, denied that northerners had any business encroaching on matters related to slavery. Northern attacks on the institution were condemned as incitements to riot by slave populations, which was deemed to be a dire threat to white southerners' security.
Northern Democratic-Republicans embraced the Jeffersonian antislavery legacy during the Missouri debates and explicitly cited the Declaration of Independence as an argument against expanding the institution. Southern leaders, seeking to defend slavery, renounced the document's universal egalitarian applications and its declaration that "all men are created equal."
Issues
Three-fifths clause
Article 1, Section 2, of the US Constitution supplemented legislative representation in states whose residents owned slaves. Known as the Three-Fifths Clause, or the "federal ratio", three-fifths of the slave population was numerically added to the free population. That sum was used for each state to calculate congressional districts and the number of delegates to the Electoral College. The federal ratio produced a significant number of legislative victories for the South in the years before the Missouri Crisis and raised the South's influence in party caucuses, the appointment of judges, and the distribution of patronage. It is unlikely that the ratio before 1820 was decisive in affecting legislation on slavery. Indeed, with the rising northern representation in the House, the southern share of the membership had declined since the 1790s.
Hostility to the federal ratio had historically been the object of the Federalists, which were now nationally ineffectual, who attributed their collective decline on the "Virginia Dynasty". They expressed their dissatisfaction in partisan terms, rather than in moral condemnation of slavery, and the pro-De Witt Clinton-Federalist faction carried on the tradition by posing as anti-restrictionists to advance their fortunes in New York politics.
Senator Rufus King of New York, a Clinton associate, was the last Federalist icon still active on the national stage, a fact that was irksome to southern Democratic-Republicans. A signatory to the US Constitution, he had strongly opposed the federal ratio in 1787. In the 15th Congress debates in 1819, he 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. Federalists both in the North and the South preferred to mute antislavery rhetoric, but during the 1820 debates in the 16th Congress, King and other Federalists would expand their old critique to include moral considerations of slavery.
Democratic-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.
As determined as southern Democratic-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 Democratic-Republicans, largely on egalitarian grounds, with sectional support from Federalists, the statehood bill died in the Senate, where the federal ratio had no relevance. The balance of power between the sections and the maintenance of Southern pre-eminence on matters related to slavery resided in the Senate.
Balance of power in Senate
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 South, voting as a bloc on measures that challenged slaveholding interests and augmented by defections from free states with varying degrees of southern sympathies, was able to tally majorities. 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.
Missouri statehood, with the Tallmadge Amendment approved, would have set a trajectory towards a free state west of the Mississippi and a decline in southern political authority. The question as to whether the Congress was allowed to restrain the growth of slavery in Missouri took on great importance in slave states. The moral dimensions of the expansion of human bondage would be raised by northern Democratic-Republicans on constitutional grounds.
Constitutional arguments
The Tallmadge Amendment was "the first serious challenge to the extension of slavery" and raised questions concerning the interpretation of the republic's founding documents.
Democratic-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.