Ominous Loomings: The Missouri Compromise, 1820
When the War of 1812 ended, the United States consisted of eighteen states—nine free and nine slave. Very soon Indiana was admitted as a free state, offset by Mississippi as a slave state. It was inevitable that this precarious balance between the North and the South would some day cause trouble, and the trouble came very soon. In 1818, Illinois entered as a free state, and the enabling legislation to admit Missouri was introduced in Congress in 1819.
The South assumed that Missouri would be a slave state, but a New York Congressman amended the Missouri statehood bill to provide for gradual freeing of the slaves there. The South reacted vigorously to keep from losing its equal representation in the Senate and blocked passage of the bill. Meanwhile, Alabama came in to balance Illinois, and there were eleven northern and eleven southern states.
The following year, when Maine applied for admission into the Union, Henry Clay of Kentucky engineered the famous Missouri Compromise. This agreement provided that Missouri would come in as a slave state but that no more slave states would be admitted from territory north of Missouri’s southern boundary. This compromise is important because it foreshadows the struggle between the North and South that eventuated in the Civil War a generation later. Although most of the oratory dealt with the slavery issue, the struggle also concerned the broader matter of political control in the West.