Missouri Compromise

Context

The years 1819 and 1820 were terrible ones for many Americans. For the first time since the ratification of the Constitution the nation was in a deep economic depression, the so-called Panic of 1819. Amid fears of mass starvation and of riots by those who had lost their livelihoods, many citizens were probably disinclined to think about the country's foremost social and political problem, the issue of slavery. Two seemingly unrelated events in early 1819, however, led to a fierce national debate over that issue. One was a Supreme Court decision, the other the attachment of an amendment to a statehood bill pending in Congress.

On February 13, 1819, Congressman James Tallmadge of New York rose in the U.S. House of Representatives to offer an amendment to the enabling bill that would set forth the conditions for the territory of Missouri to meet in order to become a state. He proposed that all slaves who were then in Missouri remain slaves in the new state but that no slaves be imported into the state from anywhere else and that children born to the slaves who were already in Missouri be freed when teenagers. This was, to his mind, a balanced proposal that would inhibit the spread of slavery while not causing slave owners in the new state to lose money or the services of slaves they already owned. It is unlikely that Tallmadge foresaw the firestorm of controversy his seemingly moderate amendment would ignite.

By 1819, politicians in slave states had become split into two general camps. One faction viewed slavery as essential to economic prosperity and wanted to preserve it even at the cost of civil war. Many in this camp feared that freed African Americans would arm themselves and exact revenge on their former masters, starting a race war. This fear was particularly strong in parts of Virginia and the Carolinas where slaves were the majority of the population, and it was often invoked to rally citizens of slave states against proposals to free slaves. The strong supporters of slavery could also offer economic arguments for their stance. Even in the midst of an economic depression in which the value of northern industrial exports had fallen, the value of slaves had risen. A good field hand who had cost $400 in 1810 would sell for $800 in 1820. This was the case because there was demand for slaves in new American territories. Slaves by the thousands were marched westward to work on the plantations of Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Women slaves of childbearing age were looked upon as a particularly good long-term investment, as the children they produced would eventually be worth more than the cotton or other crops that a good field hand could cultivate.

Southerners of a more moderate faction, led by Thomas Jefferson, regretted the institution of slavery (even if, like Jefferson, they owned slaves) and viewed it as a social evil that should be allowed to gradually die out. Since this was exactly the process contemplated for Missouri in Tallmadge's amendment, these slave-state moderates might have been expected to support, or at least acquiesce in, passage of that amendment. Instead many reacted by becoming “Radicals,” a term then applied to proslavery extremists. By the end of 1820 a South divided in its thinking had become solidly opposed to efforts to restrict slavery. Even Jefferson argued that Tallmadge's amendment and similar proposals represented too much government interference in private affairs and would enable the federal government's power to grow into tyranny. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a longtime advocate of a strong federal government, now argued just as eloquently for states' rights instead.

Contributing to this polarization of southern opinion was a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court barely a month after Tallmadge offered his amendment. On March 16, 1819, the Court ruled unanimously in the case of McCulloch v. State of Maryland et al., with Chief Justice John Marshall writing the opinion. The case had no direct bearing on slavery, but at its center was the concept of nullification, the notion advanced by states' rights advocates that, within their boundaries, individual states had the right to nullify federal laws. In Maryland the state government had tried to tax the offices of the federally established Bank of the United States. In McCulloch the Supreme Court ruled not only that the federal government had the right to establish such a bank but also that, in Chief Justice Marshall's words, “The States have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress to carry into execution the powers vested in the general government.” In other words, federal law overruled any contrary state law. This decision angered states'-rights advocates and seemed particularly ominous to slaveholders, who feared it meant the federal government could force them to give up their slaves. Thus it further fueled the debate started by Tallmadge with his amendment.

The enabling bill for Missouri statehood, complete with Tallmadge's amendment, passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 82 to 78. The Senate, however, was a different matter. The Senate for years had been roughly equally divided between senators from free states and those from slave states, and the desire of slave-state politicians to maintain this balance of power is one of the keys to understanding the debate that erupted over Tallmadge's amendment and eventually led to the Missouri Compromise. Alabama was about to be admitted to the Union and would certainly be a slave state, but Maine had also petitioned for statehood and would certainly be a free state. What happened with Missouri seemed crucial, especially since other new states undoubtedly would soon be formed out of the sprawling lands of the Louisiana Purchase.

The Senate allowed the Missouri statehood bill to die for the time being. The issue, however, did not die, and when Congress convened in a new session later in 1819, lawmakers in both houses began the arduous process that led to the compromise of 1820.

At the executive level, President Monroe had made it clear that he would veto any bill that had Tallmadge's amendment in it, but he also recognized the danger posed to America if the free states were not able to accept the eventual terms of Missouri's statehood. Thus, when the compromise of 1820 was proposed, he supported its balancing of free states against slave states and strove to have his cabinet vote in favor of it, even though the vote was only symbolic. He even persuaded Calhoun to vote in favor, delivering unanimous backing by his cabinet.

Although the Missouri Compromise temporarily maintained a shaky status quo, many Americans believed that it had set in motion ideas that would culminate in terrible tragedy. Representative Thomas W. Cobb of Georgia said to Tallmadge, “You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish” (Howe, p. 148). Tallmadge responded to criticisms of his proposal by declaring, “If dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!” (Howe, p. 148). John Quincy Adams thought the talk of seceding from the Union by some southern politicians was folly. He predicted that an independent nation of slave states would itself be torn apart by rebellion. He wrote in his diary for November 29, 1820,

If slavery be the destined sword of the hand of the destroying angel which is to severe the ties of this Union, the same sword will cut in sunder the bonds of slavery itself. A dissolution of the Union for the cause of slavery would be followed by a servile war in the slave-holding States, combined with a war between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me it might result in the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent.… Calamitous and desolating as this course of events in its progress must be, I dare not say that it is not to be desired. (Howe, p. 160)

Adams was not alone in thinking this way. Many other Americans saw the Missouri Compromise as representing the moment when the two sides of the slavery issue solidified their positions in a way that eventually brought on the Civil War.