History of the Missouri Compromise, 1820—Benjamin Lundy and the “Genius of Universal Emancipation”—Insurrection at Charleston, S. C.—The result of agitation in Congress—British Influence and Interference—Abolition in the East and West Indies—Remarkable opinion of Sir Robert Peel—Letter from Lord Brougham on the Harper’s Ferry Insurrection.
Probably there has never been in the history of the United States, except at the present time, a more critical moment, arising from the violence of domestic excitement, than the agitation of the Missouri question from 1818 to 1821. On the 18th day of December, 1818, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States presented before that body a memorial of the Legislature of the Territory of Missouri, praying that they might be admitted to form a Constitution and State government upon “an equal footing with the original States.” Here originated the difficulty. Slavery existed in the Territory proposed to be erected into an independent State. The proposition was therefore to admit Missouri as a slave State, which involved three very essential and important features. These were:—
1. The recognition of slavery therein as a State institution by the national sovereignty.
2. The guarantee of protection to the ownership of her slave property by the laws of the United States, as in the original States under the Constitution.
3. That the right of representation in the National Legislature should be apportioned on her slave population, as in the original States. This was a recognition of slavery, which at once aroused the interest of the people in every section of the Union.
The petition was received, read and reported upon, and in February, 1819, Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, proposed an amendment “prohibiting slavery except for the punishment of crimes, and that all children born in the said State after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.”
This passed the House, but was lost in the Senate. The excitement, not only in Congress, but throughout the Union, soon became intense, and for eighteen months the country was agitated from one extreme to the other. In many of the Northern States meetings were called, resolutions were passed instructing members how to vote, prayers ascended from the churches, and the pulpit began to be the medium of the incendiary diatribes for which it has since become so famous.
In both branches of Congress amendments were passed and rejected without number, while the arguments on both sides brought out the strongest views of the respective champions.
On one hand it was maintained that the compromise of the federal constitution regarding slavery respected only its existing limits at the time; that it was remote from the views of the framers of the Constitution to have the domain of slavery extended on that basis; that the fundamental principles of the American Revolution and of the government and institutions erected upon it were hostile to slavery; that the compromise of the Constitution was simply a toleration of things that were, and not a basis of things that were to be; that these securities of slavery, as it existed, would be forfeited by an extension of the system; that the honor of the republic before the world, and its moral influence with mankind in favor of freedom, were identified with the advocacy of principles of universal emancipation; that the act of 1787, which established the Territorial government north and west of the river Ohio, prohibiting slavery forever therefrom, was a public recognition and avowal of the principles and designs of the people of the United States in regard to new States and Territories north and west; and that the proposal to establish slavery in Missouri was a violation of all these great and fundamental principles.
On the other hand, it was urged that slavery was incorporated in the system of society as established in Louisiana, which comprehended the Territory of Missouri, when purchased from France in 1803; that the faith of the United States was pledged by treaty to all the inhabitants of that wide domain to maintain their rights and privileges on the same footing with the people of the rest of the country; and consequently, that slavery, being a part of their state of society, it would be a violation of engagements to abolish it without their consent. Nor could the government, as they maintained, prescribe the abolition of slavery to any part of said Territory as a condition of being erected into a State, if they were otherwise entitled to it. It might as well, as they said, be required of them to abolish any other municipal regulation, or to annihilate any other attribute of sovereignty. If the government had made an ill-advised treaty in the purchase of Louisiana, they maintained it would be manifest injustice to make its citizens suffer on that account. They claimed that they were received as a slaveholding community on the same footing with the slave States, and that the existence or non-existence of slavery could not be made a question when they presented themselves at the door of the Capitol of the republic for a State charter.