Rise of the New West, 1819-1829

by Frederick Jackson Turner

CHAPTER X

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE (1819-1821)

In the dark period of the commercial crisis of 1819, while Congress was considering the admission of Missouri, the slavery issue flamed out, and revealed with startling distinctness the political significance of the institution, fateful and ominous for the nation, transcending in importance the temporary financial and industrial ills.

The advance of settlement in the United States made the slavery contest a struggle for power between sections, marching in parallel columns into the west, each carrying its own system of labor. [Footnote: For previous questions of slavery, see Channing, Jeffersonian System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap. viii.] By 1819 the various states of the north, under favorable conditions of climate and industrial life, had either completely extinguished slavery or were in the process of emancipation [Footnote: See map, p. 6.] and by the Ordinance of 1787 the old Congress had excluded the institution in the territory north of the Ohio River. Thus Mason and Dixon's line and the Ohio made a boundary between the slave-holding and the free streams of population that flowed into the Mississippi Valley. Not that this line was a complete barrier: the Ordinance of 1787 was not construed to free the slaves already in the old French towns of the territory; and many southern masters brought their slaves into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois by virtue of laws which provided for them under the fiction of indented servants. [Footnote: Harris, Negro Servitude in Ill., 10; Durm, Indiana, chaps. ix., x.] Indeed, several efforts were made in the territory of Indiana at the beginning of the nineteenth century to rescind the prohibition of 1787; but to this petition Congress, under the strange leadership of John Randolph, gave a negative; [Footnote: Ibid., chap, xii.; Hinsdale, Old Northwest, chap, xviii.] and, after a struggle between the southern slavery and antislavery elements by which the state had been settled, Indiana entered the Union in 1816 as a free state, under an agreement not to violate the Ordinance of 1787.

Illinois, on her admission in 1818, also guaranteed the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, and, not without a contest, included in her constitution an article preventing the introduction of slavery, but so worded that the system of indenture of Negro servants was continued in a modified form. The issue of slavery still continued to influence Illinois elections, and, as the inhabitants saw well- to-do planters pass with their slaves across the state to recruit the property and population of Missouri, a movement (1823-1824) in favor of revising their constitution so as to admit slavery required the most vigorous opposition to hold the state to freedom. The leader of the antislavery forces in Illinois was a Virginian, Governor Coles (once private secretary to President Madison), who had migrated to free his slaves after he became convinced that it was hopeless to make the fight which Jefferson advised him to carry on in favor of gradual emancipation in his native state. [Footnote: Harris, Negro Servitude in III., chap. iv.; Washburne, Coles, chaps, iii., v.] In both Indiana and Illinois, the strength of the opposition to slavery and indented servitude came from the poorer whites, particularly from the Quaker and Baptist elements of the southern stock, and from the northern settlers.

In Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, ever since the decline of the tobacco culture, a strong opposition to slavery had existed, shown in the votes of those states on the Ordinance of 1787, and in the fact that as late as 1827 the great majority of the abolition societies of the United States were to be found in this region. [Footnote: Dunn, Indiana, 190; Bassettin Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, XVI., No. vi.; cf. Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. xi.] But the problem of dealing with the free Negro weighed upon the south. Even in the north these people were unwelcome. They frequently became a charge upon the community, and they were placed under numerous disabilities. [Footnote: McMaster, United States, IV., 558; Gordy, Political Hist, of U. S., II., 405.]

The idea of deporting freedmen from the United States found support both among the humanitarians, who saw in it a step towards general emancipation, and among the slave-holders who viewed the increase of the free Negroes with apprehension. To promote this solution of the problem, the Colonization Society [Footnote: McPherson, Liberia; McMaster, United States, IV., 556 et seq.] was incorporated in 1816, and it found support, not only from antislavery agitators like Lundy, who edited the "Genius of Universal Emancipation" at Baltimore, but also from slave-holders like Jefferson, Clay, and Randolph. It was the design of this society to found on the coast of Africa a colony of free blacks, brought from the United States. Although, after unsuccessful efforts, Liberia was finally established in the twenties, with the assistance of the general government (but not under its jurisdiction), it never promoted state emancipation. Nevertheless, at first it met with much sympathy in Virginia, where in 1820 the governor proposed to the legislature the use of one-third of the state revenue as a fund to promote the emancipation and deportation of the Negroes. [Footnote: Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 173, 178; Niles' Register, XVII., 363; King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 342; Adams, Memoirs, IV., 293.]

The unprofitableness of slavery in the border states, where outworn fields, the decline of tobacco culture, and the competition of western lands bore hard on the planter, [Footnote: See chap. iv. above; Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. iv.] now became an argument in favor of, permitting slavery to pass freely into the new country of the west. Any limitation of the area of slavery would diminish the value of the slaves and would leave the old south to support, under increasingly hard conditions, the redundant and unwelcome slave population in its midst. The hard times from 1817 to 1820 rendered slave property a still greater burden to Virginia. Moreover, the increase of the proportion of slaves to whites, if slavery were confined to the region east of the Mississippi, might eventually make possible a servile insurrection, particularly if foreign war should break out. All of these difficulties would be met, in the opinion of the south, by scattering the existing slaves and thus mitigating the evil without increasing the number of those in bondage.

It was seen that the struggle was not simply one of morals and of rival social and industrial institutions, but was a question of political power between the two great and opposing sections, interested, on the one side, in manufacturing and in the raising of food products under a system of free labor; and, on the other, in the production of the great staples, cotton, tobacco, and sugar, by the use of slave labor. Already the southern section had shown its opposition to tariff and internal improvements, which the majority of, the northern states vehemently favored. In other words, the slavery issue was seen to be a struggle for sectional domination.

At the beginning of the nation in 1790, the population of the north and the south was almost exactly balanced. Steadily, however, the free states drew ahead, until in 1820 they possessed a population of 5,152,000 against 4,485,000 for the slave-holding states and territories; and in the House of Representatives, by the operation of the three-fifths ratio, the free states could muster 105 votes to but 81 for the slave states. Thus power had passed definitely to the north in the House of Representatives. The instinct for self- preservation that led the planters to stand out against an apportionment in their legislatures which would throw power into the hands of non-slaveholders now led them to seek for some means to protect the interests of their minority section in the nation as a whole. The Senate offered such an opportunity: by the alternate admission of free and slave states from 1802 to 1818, out of the twenty-two states of the nation eleven were slave-holding and eleven free. If the south retained this balance, the Senate could block the action of the majority which controlled the lower House.