Missouri Compromise

(1820), in U.S. history, measure worked out between the North and the South and passed by the U.S. Congress that allowed for admission of Missouri as the 24th state (1821). It marked the beginning of the prolonged sectional conflict over the extension of slavery that led to the American Civil War.

The territory of Missouri first applied for statehood in 1817, and by early 1819 Congress was considering enabling legislation that would authorize Missouri to frame a state constitution. When Representative James Tallmadge of New York attempted to add an antislavery amendment to that legislation, however, there ensued an ugly and rancorous debate over slavery and the government's right to restrict slavery. The Tallmadge amendment prohibited the further introduction of slaves into Missouri and provided for emancipation of those already there when they reached age 25. The amendment passed the House of Representatives, controlled by the more populous North, but failed in the Senate, which was equally divided between free and slave states. Congress adjourned without resolving the Missouri question.

When it reconvened in December 1819, Congress was faced with a request for statehood from Maine. The Senate passed a bill allowing Maine to enter the Union as a free state and Missouri to be admitted without restrictions on slavery. Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois then added an amendment that allowed Missouri to become a slave state but banned slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30¢. Henry Clay then skillfully led the forces of compromise, and on March 3, 1820, the decisive vote in the House admitted Maine as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and made free soil all western territories north of Missouri's southern border.

When the Missouri constitutional convention empowered the state legislature to exclude free blacks and mulattoes, however, a new crisis was brought on. Enough northern congressmen objected to the racial provision that Henry Clay was called upon to formulate the Second Missouri Compromise. On March 2, 1821, Congress stipulated that Missouri could not gain admission to the Union until it agreed that the exclusionary clause would never be interpreted in such a way as to abridge the privileges and immunities of U.S. citizens. Missouri so agreed and became the 24th state on Aug. 10, 1821; Maine had been admitted the previous March 15.

Although slavery had been a divisive issue in the United States for decades, never before had sectional antagonism been so overt and threatening as it was in the Missouri crisis. Thomas Jefferson described the fear it evoked as “like a firebell in the night.” The compromise measures appeared to settle the slavery-extension issue, however, and the sectional conflict did not grow to the point of civil war until after the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and was declared unconstitutional in the Dred Scott decision (q.v.) of 1857.