The sectional differences which led to the missouri compromise

In an effort to preserve the balance of power in Congress between slave and free states, the Missouri Compromise was passed in admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state.

Three years later the Missouri Compromise was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Congress did not have the authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. Search this Guide Search. Missouri Compromise: Primary Documents in American History Enacted in to maintain the balance of power in Congress, the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state.

Please Note: You are viewing a legacy website that is no longer being supported. For Educators. Its repeal would bring about conflict that would lead to the Civil War.

Compromise Highlights Missouri applied for statehood on December 18, This created a problem because the Northern states refused to allow another slave state to join the Union.

In , Maine applied for statehood. Then a compromise developed: Maine could join as a free state to balance out Missouri joining as a slave state. By , the compromise had been realized. First, Missouri and Maine would be admitted to the Union, one as slave and one as free. Together these amendments would gradually end slavery in Missouri, and they passed the House by a northern majority in a sectional vote.

In his remarks on the amendments, Tallmadge argued that slavery was an immoral institution that should not be allowed to expand. Slavery had to be kept out of the virgin territory of the Trans-Mississippi West, Tallmadge insisted, lest it poison that region and put the country on the path to eventual disunion. A future without slavery was bright and promising; a future with slavery, gloomy and doomed. Tallmadge also insisted that Congress could restrict slavery under the terms of the Constitution.

Other territories had entered the Union, and Congress had provided that each meet certain requirements before being allowed to become a state, such as having a republican form of government or having a population of a certain size.

Tallmadge pointed to Article IV, Section Three of the Constitution, which said that new states could be admitted to the Union and left the terms of that admission up to Congress. In fact, Tallmadge stressed that the region west of the Mississippi River should not have the advantage of the Three-Fifths rule, a compromise that, in his view, applied only to southern states in existence at the time of the ratification of the Constitution.

Prohibiting slavery in Missouri would prevent that electoral advantage from being granted to a state that was never part of the original coastal and middle states that created the Constitution. Sectional animus boiled over, and representatives gave vent to passions on the slavery issue. Threats of disunion were common.

For his part, Tallmadge promised to embrace disunion if that was the price of addressing the threats from his colleagues of the South. Other northern representatives were equally incensed. A slaveowner himself, Clay took a position on slavery much like that of Jefferson and others. He believed slavery was an evil, but that it was also an essential part of farming and the fabric of life in Kentucky and throughout the South.

Jefferson and Madison had made a similar claim. Under this reasoning, allowing enslaved persons in Missouri was the humane policy. This portrait of him was painted in , a few years after his death. In the next Congress, in , the Senate passed a new version of the enabling bill that sought a way out of the conflict.

The bill also included an amendment from Illinois Senator Jesse B. Texas president Sam Houston managed to secure a deal with Polk and gained admission to the Union for Texas in Antislavery northerners also worried about the admission of Florida, which entered the Union as a slave state in The year became a pivotal year in the memory of antislavery leaders.

As Americans embraced calls to pursue their manifest destiny, antislavery voices looked at developments in Florida and Texas as signs that the sectional crisis had taken an ominous and perhaps irredeemable turn.

The s opened with a number of disturbing developments for antislavery leaders. The Supreme Court case Prigg v. A number of northern states reacted by passing new personal liberty laws in protest in The rising controversy over the status of freedom-seeking people swelled partly through the influence of escaped formerly enslaved people, including Frederick Douglass.

Born into slavery in at Talbot County, Maryland, Douglass grew up, like many enslaved people, barely having known his own mother or date of birth. And yet because of a range of unique privileges afforded him by the circumstances of his upbringing, as well as his own genius and determination, Douglass managed to learn how to read and write.

He used these skills to escape from slavery in , when he was just nineteen. By , Douglass put the finishing touches on his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. They also attacked fugitive slave laws by helping thousands to escape.

The incredible career of Harriet Tubman is one of the more dramatic examples. But the forces of slavery had powerful allies at every level of government. The year signaled new reversals to the antislavery cause and the beginnings of a dark new era in American politics.

President Polk and his Democratic allies were eager to see western lands brought into the Union and were especially anxious to see the borders of the nation extended to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Critics of the administration blasted these efforts as little more than land grabs on behalf of enslavers. Events in early seemed to justify antislavery complaints. Since Mexico had never recognized independent Texas, it continued to lay claim to its lands, even after the United States admitted it to the Union.

In January , Polk ordered troops to Texas to enforce claims stemming from its border dispute along the Rio Grande. Whigs, like Abraham Lincoln, found their protests sidelined, but antislavery voices were becoming more vocal and more powerful. After , the sectional crisis raged throughout North America. Debates swirled over whether the new lands would be slave or free. The South began defending slavery as a positive good.

At the same time, Congressman David Wilmot submitted his Wilmot Proviso late in , banning the expansion of slavery into the territories won from Mexico. The proviso gained widespread northern support and even passed the House with bipartisan support, but it failed in the Senate.

The treaty infuriated antislavery leaders in the United States. The spoils of war were impressive, but it was clear they would help expand slavery. But knowing that the Liberty Party was also not likely to provide a home to many moderate voters, leaders fostered a new and more competitive party, which they called the Free Soil Party. Left unrepresented, antislavery Free Soil leaders swung into action.

Questions about the balance of free and slave states in the Union became even more fierce after the US acquired these territories from Mexico by the in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Map of the Mexican Cession, Demanding an alternative to the pro-slavery status quo, Free Soil leaders assembled so-called Conscience Whigs.

The new coalition called for a national convention in August at Buffalo, New York. A number of ex-Democrats committed to the party right away, including an important group of New Yorkers loyal to Martin Van Buren. It was a promising start. In , Free Soil leaders claimed just 10 percent of the popular vote but won over a dozen House seats and even managed to win one Senate seat in Ohio, which went to Salmon P.

The admission of Wisconsin as a free state in May helped cool tensions after the Texas and Florida admissions. Led by figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, women with deep ties to the abolitionist cause, it represented the first of such meetings ever held in U. In some ways that is precisely what it did. But come November, the spirit of reform failed to yield much at the polls. The upheavals of came to a quick end.

Taylor remained in office only a brief time until his unexpected death from a stomach ailment in While Taylor was alive, his administration struggled to find a good remedy. Increased clamoring for the admission of California, New Mexico, and Utah pushed the country closer to the edge. Gold had been discovered in California, and as thousands continued to pour onto the West Coast and through the trans-Mississippi West, the admission of new states loomed.

In Utah, Mormons were also making claims to an independent state they called Deseret. By , California wanted admission as a free state. With so many competing dynamics under way, and with the president dead and replaced by Whig Millard Fillmore, the s were off to a troubling start. Congressional leaders like Henry Clay and newer legislators like Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois were asked to broker a compromise, but this time it was clear no compromise could bridge all the diverging interests at play in the country.

Clay eventually left Washington disheartened by affairs. It fell to young Stephen Douglas, then, to shepherd the bills through Congress, which he in fact did.

Legislators rallied behind the Compromise of , an assemblage of bills passed late in , which managed to keep the promises of the Missouri Compromise alive.

Senate during the debates over the Compromise of The print shows a number of incendiary personalities, like John C. Calhoun, whose increasingly sectional beliefs were pacified for a time by the Compromise.

Rothermel artist , c. The Compromise of tried to offer something to everyone, but in the end it only worsened the sectional crisis.

For southerners, the package offered a tough new fugitive slave law that empowered the federal government to deputize regular citizens in arresting runaways. The New Mexico Territory and the Utah Territory would be allowed to determine their own fates as slave or free states based on popular sovereignty. The compromise also allowed territories to submit suits directly to the Supreme Court over the status of freedom-seeking people within their bounds. The admission of California as the newest free state in the Union cheered many northerners, but even the admission of a vast new state full of resources and rich agricultural lands was not enough.

In addition to California, northerners also gained a ban on the slave trade in Washington, D. But the compromise debates soon grew ugly.

After the Compromise of , antislavery critics became increasingly certain that enslavers had co-opted the federal government, and that a southern Slave Power secretly held sway in Washington, where it hoped to make slavery a national institution. These northern complaints pointed back to how the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution gave southerners proportionally more representatives in Congress.

In the s, antislavery leaders increasingly argued that Washington worked on behalf of enslavers while ignoring the interests of white working men. None of the individual measures in the Compromise of proved more troubling to antislavery Americans than the Fugitive Slave Act.

Under its provisions, local authorities in the North could not interfere with the capture of fugitives. Northern citizens, moreover, had to assist in the arrest of fugitives when called upon by federal agents. Many northerners were also troubled by the way the bill undermined local and state laws. The law itself fostered corruption and the enslavement of free Black northerners. The presidential election gave the Whigs their most stunning defeat and effectively ended their existence as a national political party.

Whigs captured just 42 of the electoral votes needed to win. With the Compromise of and plenty of new lands, peaceful consensus seemed to be on the horizon. Antislavery feelings continued to run deep, however, and their depth revealed that with a Democratic Party misstep, a coalition united against the Democrats might yet emerge and bring them to defeat. Even abolitionists struggled with the deeply ingrained racism that plagued American society.

The book revolves around Eliza the woman holding the young boy and Tom standing with his wife Chloe , each of whom takes a very different path: Eliza escapes slavery using her own two feet, but Tom endures his chains only to die by the whip of a brutish enslaver. The horrific violence that both endured melted the hearts of many northerners and pressed some to join in the fight against slavery.

Democrats by were badly splintered along sectional lines over slavery, but they also had reasons to act with confidence. Voters had returned them to office in following the bitter fights over the Compromise of Emboldened, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced a set of additional amendments to a bill drafted in late to help organize the Nebraska Territory, the last of the Louisiana Purchase lands. In , the Nebraska Territory was huge, extending from the northern end of Texas to the Canadian border.