| The revival of the Missouri struggle. |
But the peace proved to be only an armistice. In less than twelve months the battle was raging again with more than its former fury.
The Missouri convention, which drew up and voted, in the middle of the year 1820, the organic law for the new Commonwealth, inserted a paragraph therein which made it the duty of the legislature, proposed to be established by that law, to enact measures for preventing mulattoes and free negroes from immigrating into and settling within the Commonwealth.
| The Missouri constitution in Congress. |
On November 14th, 1820, this instrument was presented to the Senate of the United States, and on the 16th to the House of Representatives, for the purpose of moving these bodies to pass an act admitting Missouri into the Union as a Commonwealth. The instrument was immediately referred by each House to a committee; and on the 23rd, Mr. Lowndes, the chairman of the House Committee, reported a bill for effecting this result, and, on the 29th, Mr. Smith reported a bill of like tenor to the Senate.
| Mr. Lowndes' bill for the admission of Missouri with the instrument unchanged. |
Mr. Lowndes' bill was prefaced by a statement of views, which presented the questions of constitutional interpretation to which the provision referred to in the Missouri instrument gave rise. He alluded to the possible repugnance of the provision to that clause in the Constitution of the United States which guarantees to the citizens of each Commonwealth all the privileges and immunities of citizens in every other Commonwealth; but said that the provision in the Missouri instrument could be interpreted to mean only such mulattoes and free negroes as were not citizens in any Commonwealth. And he held that, whether this be the true interpretation or not, the judiciary of the United States, and not the Congress, should determine the question of repugnance between the Missouri instrument and the Constitution of the United States. He finally took the ground that Missouri was now already a Commonwealth by virtue of the Act of Congress giving her people permission to form Commonwealth government, and by virtue of the act of her people in forming a Commonwealth constitution, and he declared that the refusal or failure of Congress, at this time, to pass a formal act of admission could not reduce her again to the Territorial status.
| Serious opposition to the Lowndes bill. |