Missouri Compromise

Impact

John Quincy Adams, in his diary entry for February 24, 1820, said of the Missouri Compromise, “The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation. This object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue. A life devoted to it would be nobly spent or sacrificed” (Howe, p. 813). Thomas Jefferson had a somewhat different view of the effects of the compromise, saying that “like a fire bell in the night,” it awakened and terrified him: “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.… 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; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper” (Howe, p. 157).

One effect of the compromise was to do what Jefferson feared it would: divide America into two geographically distinct parts. Most of his southern colleagues, however, believed that they had gotten the better of the deal. For one thing, the compromise established that some new states would be admitted as slave states, which in effect meant that the federal government recognized slavery as an American institution. For another, the compromise would, at least for the immediate future, prevent the North from taking complete control of Congress by ensuring that there were enough slave states to keep the Senate evenly divided between antislavery northerners and proslavery southerners. For their part, some northern politicians agreed with a view expressed by Jefferson, that adding slave states to the Union would spread slave ownership more thinly, making it easier at some future time to abolish slavery gradually and peacefully, state by state.

Not all advocates of slavery were satisfied with the compromise. In Missouri proslavery factions began murdering antislavery Missourians. By the late 1850s atrocities were being committed by both sides. Thus, the Civil War had already begun in Missouri long before the official secession of the states that formed the Confederacy in 1861. Although Missouri was not supposed to prevent free African Americans who were citizens in other states from settling in Missouri, the state government, dominated by proslavery officials, passed laws prohibiting free African Americans from anywhere else to settle in Missouri. This law openly defied the Constitution, which said that the rights of citizens of one state had to be accepted in all other states.

In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case Dred Scott v. Sandford. The slave Dred Scott had argued that when he was taken by his owner to a free state, he was automatically a free man because the free state's laws governed all within that state, including people visiting from outside the state. The Supreme Court ruled against him, allowing his owner to keep him as a slave. In the process, the Court ruled the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, voiding its restraints on practicing slavery in free states. This ruling resulted in many antislavery Americans believing that only by armed force would slavery by restrained.