Looking for:
Missouri compromise mapMissouri compromise map.Missouri Compromise, 7th & 8th grade
- Missouri Compromise - Wikipedia
Missouri compromise map. Map of Missouri Compromise
In the s, with the introduction of the cotton gin , to , 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 Jeffersonian 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 Jeffersonian 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.
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 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 s. 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 antirestrictionists 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 Republicans. In the 15th Congress debates in , 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 debates in the 16th Congress, King and other Federalists would expand their old critique to include moral considerations of slavery. Republican James Tallmadge Jr. 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 Republicans were to secure Missouri statehood with slavery, the federal clause ratio to provide the margin of victory in the 15th Congress.
The balance of power between the sections and the maintenance of Southern pre-eminence on matters related to slavery resided in the 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 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 , 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 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 Republicans on constitutional grounds.
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. Jeffersonian 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. Further, antislavery legislators invoked Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which requires states to provide a republican form of government. As the Louisiana Territory was not part of the United States in , they argued that introducing slavery into Missouri would thwart the egalitarian intent of the Founders.
Proslavery Republicans countered that the Constitution had long been interpreted as having relinquished any claim to restricting slavery in the states. The free inhabitants of Missouri in the territorial phase or during statehood had the right to establish or disestablish slavery without interference from the federal government.
As to the Northwest Ordinance, southerners denied that it could serve as a lawful antecedent for the territories of the Louisiana Purchase, as the ordinance had been issued under the Articles of Confederation , rather than the US Constitution. As a legal precedent, they offered the treaty acquiring the Louisiana lands in , a document that included a provision, Article 3, which extended the rights of US citizens to all inhabitants of the new territory, including the protection of property in slaves.
In doing so, he set a constitutional precedent that would serve to rationalize Tallmadge's federally-imposed slavery restrictions. The 15th Congress had debates that focused on constitutional questions but largely avoided the moral dimensions raised by the topic of slavery.
That the unmentionable subject had been raised publicly was deeply offensive to southern representatives and violated the long-time sectional understanding between legislators from free states and slave states. Missouri statehood confronted southern Jeffersonians with the prospect of applying the egalitarian principles espoused by the Revolutionary generation. That would require halting the spread of slavery westward and confine the institution to where it already existed.
Faced with a population of 1. Slaveholders in the 16th Congress, in an effort to come to grips with that paradox, resorted to a theory that called for extending slavery geographically so as to encourage its decline, which they called "diffusion".
On February 16, , the House Committee of the Whole voted to link Tallmadge's provisions with the Missouri statehood legislation by 79— The debates in the House's 2nd session in lasted only three days.
They have been characterized as "rancorous", "fiery", "bitter", "blistering", "furious" and "bloodthirsty". You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish. If a 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! Representatives from the North outnumbered those from the South in House membership to When each of the restrictionist provisions was put to the vote, they passed along sectional lines: 87 to 76 for prohibition on further slave migration into Missouri and 82 to 78 for emancipating the offspring of slaves at The enabling bill was passed to the Senate, and both parts of it were rejected: 22—16 against the restriction of new slaves in Missouri supported by five northerners, two of whom were the proslavery legislators from the free state of Illinois and 31—7 against the gradual emancipation for slave children born after statehood.
The Missouri Compromise debates stirred suspicions by slavery interests that the underlying purpose of the Tallmadge Amendments had little to do with opposition to the expansion of slavery. The accusation was first leveled in the House by the Republican anti-restrictionist John Holmes from the District of Maine. He suggested that Senator Rufus King's "warm" support for the Tallmadge Amendment concealed a conspiracy to organize a new antislavery party in the North, which would be composed of old Federalists in combination with disaffected antislavery Republicans.
The fact that King in the Senate and Tallmadge and Tyler in the House, all New Yorkers, were among the vanguard for restriction on slavery in Missouri lent credibility to those charges. When King was re-elected to the US Senate in January , during the 16th Congress debates and with bipartisan support, suspicions deepened and persisted throughout the crisis. Jefferson, at first unperturbed by the Missouri question, soon became convinced that a northern conspiracy was afoot, with Federalists and crypto-Federalists posing as Republicans and using Missouri statehood as a pretext.
The disarray of the Republican ascendancy brought about by amalgamation made fears abound in Southerners that a Free State Party might take shape if Congress failed to reach an understanding over Missouri and slavery and possibly threaten southern pre-eminence. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts surmised that the political configuration for just such a sectional party already existed.
There was no basis, however, for the charge that Federalists had directed Tallmadge in his antislavery measures, and there was nothing to indicate that a New York-based King-Clinton alliance sought to erect an antislavery party on the ruins of the Republican Party.
The allegations by Southern interests for slavery of a "plot" or that of "consolidation" as a threat to the Union misapprehended the forces at work in the Missouri crisis.
The core of the opposition to slavery in the Louisiana Purchase was informed by Jeffersonian egalitarian principles, not a Federalist resurgence. Because it no longer wanted to be part of non-contiguous Massachusetts after the War of , the northern region of Massachusetts , the District of Maine , sought and ultimately gained admission into the United States as a free state to become the separate state of Maine.
That occurred only as a result of a compromise involving slavery in Missouri and in the federal territories of the American West. The admission of another slave state would increase southern power when northern politicians had already begun to regret the Constitution's Three-Fifths Compromise.
Although more than 60 percent of white Americans lived in the North, northern representatives held only a slim majority of congressional seats by The additional political representation allotted to the South as a result of the Three-Fifths Compromise gave southerners more seats in the House of Representatives than they would have had if the number was based on the free population alone.
Moreover, since each state had two Senate seats, Missouri's admission as a slave state would result in more southern than northern senators. James Tallmadge of New York offered the Tallmadge Amendment , which forbade further introduction of slaves into Missouri and mandated that all children of slave parents born in the state after its admission to be free at the age of The committee adopted the measure and incorporated it into the bill as finally passed on February 17, , by the House.
The Senate refused to concur with the amendment, and the whole measure was lost. During the following session — , the House passed a similar bill with an amendment, introduced on January 26, , by John W. Taylor of New York , allowing Missouri into the union as a slave state. The question had been complicated by the admission in December of Alabama , a slave state , which made the number of slave and free states equal.
In addition, there was a bill in passage through the House January 3, to admit Maine as a free state. The Senate decided to connect the two measures. It passed a bill for the admission of Maine with an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to form a state constitution. Before the bill was returned to the House, a second amendment was adopted, on the motion of Jesse B. The vote in the Senate was for the compromise. The amendment and the bill passed in the Senate on February 17 and February 18, The House then approved the Senate compromise amendment, 90—87, with all of the opposition coming from representatives from the free states.
The two houses were at odds on the issue of the legality of slavery but also on the parliamentary question of the inclusion of Maine and Missouri in the same bill.
The committee recommended the enactment of two laws, one for the admission of Maine and the other an enabling act for Missouri. It also recommended having no restrictions on slavery but keeping the Thomas Amendment.
Both houses agreed, and the measures were passed on March 5, , and signed by President James Monroe on March 6. The question of the final admission of Missouri came up during the session of — The struggle was revived over a clause in Missouri's new constitution, written in , which required the exclusion of "free negroes and mulattoes" from the state. The influence of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay , known as "The Great Compromiser", an act of admission was finally passed if the exclusionary clause of the Missouri constitution should "never be construed to authorize the passage of any law" impairing the privileges and immunities of any U.
That deliberately ambiguous provision is sometimes known as the Second Missouri Compromise. For decades afterward, Americans hailed the agreement as an essential compromise, almost on the sacred level of the Constitution itself. The disputes involved the competition between the southern and northern states for power in Congress and control over future territories. There were also the same factions emerging, as the Democratic-Republican Party began to lose its coherence.
In an April 22 letter to John Holmes , Thomas Jefferson wrote that the division of the country created by the Compromise Line would eventually lead to the destruction of the Union: [98]. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. 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.
The debate over the admission of Missouri also raised the issue of sectional balance, as the country was equally divided between slave states and free states, with eleven each. To admit Missouri as a slave state would tip the balance in the Senate, which is made up of two senators per state, in favor of the slave states. That made northern states want Maine admitted as a free state. Maine was admitted in , [] and Missouri in , [] The trend of admitting a new free or slave state to balance the status of previous ones would continue up until The next state to be admitted would be Arkansas slave state in , quickly followed by Michigan free state in In , two slave states Texas and Florida were admitted, which was countered by the free states of Iowa and Wisconsin in and From the constitutional standpoint, the Missouri Compromise was important as the example of congressional exclusion of slavery from US territory acquired since the Northwest Ordinance.
Then, the student will take their set of original questions to an expert student one that has been designated by the teacher : together the students will collaborate and discuss points that are accurately clarified and points of misconceptions.
From there the student will take a post-it note and write down their refined and supported understandings about the Missouri Compromise: The Post-It Note Should address the following prompts:. The issue that it addressed within the Missouri Compromise:. Different views about the Missouri Compromise:. The impact of the Missouri Compromise on the nation:. Questioning Reflections. Have students construct responses that demonstrate their ability to grasp abstract concepts and critically analyze events and information to infer its overall impact.
Reflection Statements:. How was James Tallmadge different from Henry Clay? What are the characteristics of a successful compromise? How do you know these are needed? In what ways could we show the impact of the Missouri Compromise outside of Congress? How does the Missouri Compromise relate to the Civil War. Have students share their reflection with a student that sees the content differently or in a way that is more supervisual in understanding.
What is one thing that you still have a question about after your conversation? What are two things that you feel you understand better? With the purchase of the Louisiana Territory and the application of Missouri for statehood, the long-standing balance between the number of slave states and the number of free states would be changed.
Controversy arose within Congress over the issue of slavery. Congress adopted this legislation and admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a non-slave state at the same time, so that the balance between slave and free states in the nation would remain equal.
This provision held for 34 years, until it was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of Sandford decision. This document is available on DocsTeach , the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives. Find teaching activities that incorporate this document, or create your own online activity. Previous Document Next Document. An Act to authorize the people of the Missouri territory to form a constitution and state government, and for the admission of such state into the Union on an equal footing with the original states, and to prohibit slavery in certain territories.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That the inhabitants of that portion of the Missouri territory included within the boundaries herein after designated, be, and they are hereby, authorized to form for themselves a constitution and state government, and to assume such name as they shall deem proper; and the said state, when formed, shall be admitted into the Union, upon an equal footing with the original states, in all respects whatsoever.
And be it further enacted, That the said state shall consist of all the territory included within the following boundaries, to wit: Beginning in the middle of the Mississippi river, on the parallel of thirty-six degrees of north latitude; thence west, along that parallel of latitude, to the St.
And provided also, That the said state shall have concurrent jurisdiction on the river Mississippi, and every other river bordering on the said state so far as the said rivers shall form a common boundary to the said state; and any other state or states, now or hereafter to be formed and bounded by the same, such rivers to be common to both; and that the river Mississippi, and the navigable rivers and waters leading into the same, shall be common highways, and for ever free, as well to the inhabitants of the said state as to other citizens of the United States, without any tax, duty impost, or toll, therefor, imposed by the said state.
And be it further enacted, That all free white male citizens of the United States, who shall have arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and have resided in said territory: three months previous to the day of election, and all other persons qualified to vote for representatives to the general assembly of the said territory, shall be qualified to be elected and they are hereby qualified and authorized to vote, and choose representatives to form a convention, who shall be apportioned amongst the several counties as follows : From the county of Howard, five representatives.
From the county of Cooper, three representatives.
No comments:
Post a Comment