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•The Center for American Civics•Season 1•Episode 158
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We trace how the Missouri Compromise tried to hold a fragile Union together by pairing Missouri and Maine, drawing a line across the map, and postponing a moral decision. The story connects founding-era bargains to Kansas-Nebraska, Dred Scott, and the rise of a party that said no more expansion of slavery.
• Louisiana Purchase expansion without slavery rules • Declaration ideals versus entrenched slavery • Congress as lead actor under Monroe • Missouri as slave state, Maine as free state • The geographic line and Senate balance • Jefferson’s “firebell in the night” warning • Founding compromises and three-fifths power boost • Abolitionist surge and pro-slavery ideology • Compromise of 1850 as echo of 1820 • Kansas-Nebraska repeal and Dred Scott escalation • Republican Party rise and end of compromise
Welcome back to Civic City Year. Today we are talking about the Missouri Compromise. So the date on this one is 1820. And we have Dr. Paul Carece with us to talk about this primary source. So, Dr. Carries, the Missouri Compromise, what was the Missouri Compromise and why is it a significant moment in American political history?
SPEAKER_01
Thanks, Liz. This is a very important moment because, in a way, uh any serious American citizen today in the 21st century would need to understand it as part of the path to the Civil War in 1860 that somehow America in its first 70 years could not figure out how to avoid
a cataclysmic conflict over slavery and what to do with it. So to put this in context, one reason there was a crisis in 1820 over what to do with the Missouri Territory becoming the state of Missouri is because of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which under President Jefferson's first administration doubled the size of the United States, extending the United States to the Mississippi River and beyond, but it didn't resolve the question of what to do about slavery. And again, that's a question because the Declaration of Independence and its principles would seem to be opposed to the idea of Americans holding other human beings as property. So the Louisiana Purchase sets up this issue that isn't resolved in Jefferson's
presidency, Madison's presidency, and now we're into Monroe's presidency by 1820. Now, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, right, which is passed under the Articles of Confederation Congress, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had abolished slavery in those Northwest territories. And there are, what, five or six states that come out of the Northwest Ordinance, you know, Illinois through Minnesota, right? So that was a statement that and and George Washington as first president and the first Congress repasses the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. So that puts the United States government on the trajectory of saying, in the new territories, we're not going to have slavery. But it turns out that those were territories up in the North. And from the 1780s
onward, the new states in the North had abolished slavery, but of course the states in the South had kept slavery. So President Jefferson hadn't come up with any equivalent idea of abolishing slavery in the new Western territories established by the Louisiana Purchase, nor had President Madison, and now we're toward, you know, we're into James Monroe's presidency by 1820. So that's one context, the Louisiana Purchase. The second is that a crisis arises in 1820 because, as I've been mentioning, of the basic compromise established at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the 1787 Constitution being proposed, the compromise about slavery. In Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence, he has a paragraph which is brutally critical of King George for imposing the slave trade on these North American colonies. It's all the king's fault. But it clearly takes a moral position that slavery per se is wrong, violates equal natural rights of human beings. And the Second Continental Congress can't handle that. The Southern colonies turning into states don't want that strong a condemnation of slavery. And so it's it's removed in the final debate about what the text of the final text of the Declaration will be. And the 1787 Constitution also does not resolve the obvious contradiction between the main principles of the Declaration on the one hand and the continuation of slavery in the United States on the other hand. So you know the the the question is: should slavery for the United States from the 1780s into the 1790s and going onward, should slavery be curtailed? Should it be somehow, you know, the slave trade should be discontinued? Should slavery be gradually abolished? Should it be immediately abolished? And and so by 1820, presidents and congresses had avoided the issue generally, other than the Northwest Ordinance, and and they had definitely had avoided
it regarding the new Louisiana territories. I mean, to give credit to President Jefferson, he had signed in 1808 legislation from Congress to abolish the slave trade. That's because that was permitted in the 1787 Constitution as a possibility. The United States could abolish the slave trade as of 1808. Congress and President Jefferson do that. But he hadn't President Jefferson and no later presidents had done anything about the slavery question. So finally, there's one third element, one final element, third element to bring up about 1820. President Monroe had continued the idea inherited from Presidents Jefferson and Madison that the presidency should be fairly weak. Congress should really be the lead branch of the government. President Madison and President Monroe kind of stuck to the theory. Congress should be the lead power of the Union of the federal government. And so President Monroe when this the immediate issue that comes up in 1820 is what to do about Missouri wanting to become a state, and then also Maine, up in the Northeast, wanting to become a state. And President Monroe sort of says Congress is the lead on these major questions of domestic policy. This is not a foreign policy question where the executive could arguably said to have a more prominent role. This is a domestic question, leave it to Congress. So in 1820, Congress, as a legislature, does what legislatures do, state legislatures, Congress, they they broker a deal. They come up with a compromise. You have all these people and different factions and parties. So what what then, given these three points, does the Missouri Compromise of 1820 do? First, it says Missouri comes into the Union as a slave state, but Maine and the Northeast comes in as a free state. And the crucial compromise there is especially involving the Senate. So the pro-slavery southern states want to make sure that there's never a supermajority of states, therefore never a supermajority of senators in the Senate, who could vote to approve an amendment to the Constitution that would abolish slavery. It's okay to have a majority of the states, majority of senators being opposed to slavery, but you need a supermajority, because of the filibuster rule in the Senate, you need a majority. I'm sorry, you need a supermajority
in the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment. So it's okay that Maine's going to come as a free state, but we've got to set this precedent, so argue the pro-slavery people in 1820. We've got to set this precedent or principle that we've got to keep a balance. Pro-slavery states come in. So that's that's the deal in 1820, the Missouri Compromise. Missouri comes in as a slave state, Maine is a free state. Then this really means a kind of temporary resolution of the crisis over slavery by also in the Missouri Compromise banning any territories north of the southern border of Missouri. So we'd be helpful looking at a map now. Any territories north of the southern border of Missouri could only come into the Union as free states, abolition of slavery. But it also then means the principle implicitly that states south of the southern border of Missouri, I mean territories becoming states, heading out to the West, they could come in as slave states. And that keeps the ratio that the pro-slavery states in the South want to keep. That there's enough
of a minority of slavery plus pro-slavery states you could never get a constitutional amendment banning slavery. And where is this line, the southern border of Missouri? If you go across the West to the Pacific Ocean, we're in the state of Arizona. It's basically the northern border of New Mexico and Arizona, and then get again cutting it to California. So it's the lower third of the geography of the United States as we know it now, the Continental 48 states. Basically, that lower third says slavery can be permitted in the territories and then the states becoming territories. So this is a compromise that avoids the crisis of potentially the Union busting up in 1820. And does say something of the spirit of the Northwest ordinance carries that in the northern part of the Union there won't be slavery, but in the southern part there can be slavery. And I will say there were Jefferson in 1820 uses very panicked language in a letter, and he knows all his letters are going to become public. When this crisis is arising about what to do in Missouri and what to do in Maine, he writes a letter before the compromise saying this momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the Union, meaning the death knell of the Union. This is Jefferson in 1820, who, again, as president, hadn't done anything to address this, and then is relieved at the compromise of 1820.
SPEAKER_00
So the Missouri Compromise holds the Union together because, again, to place
ourselves here, the Civil War has not happened yet. This is all the stuff before. But because it doesn't resolve the issue of whether slavery was compatible with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, it left open the possibility of a future deep crisis.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, this is in a way the great tragedy or the irony of the American founding and then of our political history in the 19th century that the founding involves necessarily, I think you could argue, a compromise over slavery. We don't really get the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and we don't get the Constitution proposed by the Constitutional Convention in 1787 unless there's this kind of compromise. So as I mentioned before, Jefferson has to sit there in the Second Continental Congress while that paragraph condemning slavery struck from the final text of the Declaration. And then in the 1787 Constitutional Convention, in order to gain the support of the Southern states in 1787 to replace the Articles, too, too weak or really no government of the Union, with a stronger government, they want protection for some kind of recognition of slavery and the perpetration of slavery, at least temporarily. So, you know, students of American history will know that there is the three-fifths persons clause, which gives some additional representation in the House of Representatives effectively to the Southern states by letting them count three-fifths of the population of slaves they hold as part of their population base for
representation, electing people to the House. There's the Fugitive Persons Clause in the proposed 1787 Constitution. And on the other hand, there is the reference, as I mentioned, to the possibility in 1808 of banning the slave trade, sort of kicking that down the road, but it sort of puts a marker down, oh, maybe the slave trade is not a good thing, right? And then as Abraham Lincoln later in this in the 19th century and others will say, note that Frederick Douglass notes this, note that the word slave or slavery is never used in the Constitution. There's always this reference to persons and other ways of getting around explicitly saying slave slavery as if to suggest this is morally offensive. We've got to refer to it somehow, but we're going to talk around it. That's the Lincoln-Fredrick Douglas interpretation. So there were compromises made in the Declaration, in the Constitution. And Lincoln will argue later in the century, this is because the Americans are embarrassed by slavery. They know it doesn't fit with the principles of the Declaration. It's a moral shame, and they're hoping to work out how to deal with it, get rid of it later. But various things happened in history. The cotton gin in the 1790s, the Louisiana Purchase, meaning there's more territory out to the West, the Mexican War under President Polk in the middle of the 19th century further expands territory out to the West. And also an unintended consequence, perhaps, but maybe it should have been foreseen. That three-fifths clause about representation in the House of Representatives does give a boost to the Southern states. So they have a presence in the House of Representatives that they otherwise wouldn't have if it was just counting white people as the basis of representation. More Southerners end up as speakers of the House and leaders in the House. More Southerners end up as presidents because there's a boost in the Electoral College, the basis of the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives for your votes in Electoral College. So more Southerners end up being presidents, more slaveholders end up being presidents in in the 19th century. I mean, obviously starting with Thomas Jefferson in 1800. So for all these different reasons, the predominant spirit develops in the 19th century that we're not going to solve the problem of slavery the way arguably the Declaration of Independence points toward resolving it, meaning we have to figure out how to gradually abolish slavery, gradual emancipation, abolish slavery. No, those go off the table, and we're talking about these compromises. How to sort of manage it kind of crisis by crisis. Now, on the other hand, because this is unsatisfactory to the northern states, to certain principles of Christianity, principles of the Declaration, an
abolitionist movement arrived. And the abolitionist movement and the women's suffrage movement end up being sort of partners in the middle of the 19th century. That provokes, on the other hand, a strong pro-slavery argument arising in the South to say, you know what, the problem here is the Declaration of Independence. It's just got a false view of these cheap rhetorical lines for the Declaration about all human beings created equal and this stuff. That's not true. It's not true in its most extended sense. Reasonable people have known for all of human civil civilization that some races are superior and some races are inferior. And we've got that in America. So it's the declaration that's problem. So there's like polarizing that's happening in the 19th century. Abolitionists saying this delay, compromise, kicking it down the road, that's not good. And then the pro-slavery view on the opposite extreme, the declaration is the problem. And you abolitionists are un-American and you're the problem. And that leads to another crisis by 1850, which produces another compromise document, the compromise of of 1850, which again is sort of an echo of the Missouri Compromise.
SPEAKER_00
So is the compromise of 1850 an echo or an extension of the Missouri Compromise of 1820? But then there are also signs that by 1850, support for continuing compromise about slavery is starting to weaken.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. So various signs of this. A figure named Abraham Lincoln starts to rise and be prominent. And a free soil party arises. And and the then the Republican Party arises because it so, for example, Lincoln in 1852 gives a wonderful eulogy for Henry Clay, who was the main architect of the compromise of 1850. But it also says basically in the eulogy, the time for compromise is over. When you have people in the southern states making the pro-slavery argument, do away with the declaration, then we can how can we, who know that morally the declaration is against
slavery, how can we keep compromising with folks like that? And then the Kansas-Nebraska Act comes along with 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas, that basically repeals the Missouri Compromise. It allows a slave state north of the line set by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and then the Dred Scott decision in 1857 by the Supreme Court saying slavery should be legal everywhere. The Missouri Compromise itself was unconstitutional. Congress can't limit any where the presence of slavery can be, anywhere in the Union. But again, in response to all of this, the Republican Party is launched as the clearly anti-slavery party in the sense that slavery can no longer extend. We can't compromise, we can't extend it any further into any territories. And so by the elections of 1856, 1858, 1860, we're at a new level of crisis, and there's no there's no room left for compromise.
SPEAKER_00
Thank you so much. I think you know, you mentioned the parties, and we have episodes, you know, on the rise of the Republican Party, you know, with Lincoln. So definitely we can link these together. But it's fun to go through American history with these primary sources. So not only the Missouri Compromise of 1820, we also looked today at the compromise of 1850. So thank you so much. It is appreciated, and I'm excited for our next primary source.
