Slavery and four years of war

by Joseph Warren Keifer

Missouri was a part of the Louisiana Purchase, and she had in 1820 above 10,000 slaves.

The usual form of a bill was prepared admitting her, with slavery, on an equal footing with other States. It came up for consideration in the House during the session of 1818-1819, and Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, precipitated a controversy, which was participated in by all the great statesmen, North and South, who were then on the political stage.

He offered to amend the bill so as to prohibit the further introduction of slaves into Missouri, and providing that all children born in the State after its admission should be free at twenty-five years of age.

This amendment was a signal for the fiercest opposition. Clay and Webster, Wm. Pinckney of Maryland, and Rufus King of New York, John Randolph of Roanoke, Fisher Ames, and others, who were in the early prime of their manhood, were heard in the fray. In it the first real threats of disunion, if slavery were interfered with, were heard. It is more than possible those threats pierced the ears of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who still survived,(41) and caused them to despair of the Republic.

It is worthy of note that none of the great statesmen engaged in this first memorable combat in which the Union was threatened in slavery's cause, lived to confront disunion in fact, face to face.

Clay, then Speaker of the House, and possessed of great influence, spoke first in opposition to the amendment. Though his speech, like others of that time, was not reported, we know he denied the power of Congress to impose conditions upon a new State after its admission to the Union. He maintained the sovereign right of each State to be slave or free. He did not profess to be an advocate of slavery. He, however, vehemently asserted that a restriction of slavery was cruel to the slaves already held. While their numbers would be the same, it would so crowd them in narrow limits as to expose them "in the old, exhausted States to destitution, and even to lean and haggard starvation, instead of allowing them to share the fat plenty of the new West."(42) (What an argument in favor of perpetuating an immoral thing! So spread it over the world as to make it thin, yet fatten it!)

Clay's arguments were the most specious and weighty of those made against the amendment. And they did not fail to claim the amendment was in violation of the third article of the cession of Louisiana, already, in another connection, referred to.

The Missouri delegate denounced the amendment as a shameful discrimination against Missouri and slavery, which would endanger the Union; in this latter cry a member from Georgia joined.

The friends of the amendment fearlessly answered Clay's speech and the speeches of others. The House was reminded that the great Ordinance of 1787, passed contemporaneous with the adoption of the Constitution, and approved and enforced by its framers (some of whom were also then members of the Continental Congress) imposed an absolute inhibition on slavery forever, precedent to the admission of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the other States to be formed from the Northwest Territory; they showed the treaty with France did not profess to perpetuate slavery in the ceded Territory; they denounced slavery as an evil, unnatural, cruel, opposed to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and that it had only been tolerated, not approved, by the Constitution; and Mr. Talmadge closed the debate by characterizing slavery as a "scourge of the human race," certain to bring on "dire calamities to the human race"; ending by boldly defying those who threatened, if slavery were restricted, to dissolve the Union of the States. This amendment passed the House, 87 to 76, but was beaten, the same session, in the Senate, 22 to 16; one Senator from Massachusetts, one from Pennsylvania, and two from Illinois voted with the South. Again the too often easily frightened Northern statesmen struck their colors just when the battle was won.

In January (1820) of the succeeding Congress the measure was again under consideration in the Senate, then composed of only forty-four members. It was then that Rufus King and Wm. Pinckney, the former for, the latter against, the slavery restriction amendment, displayed their eloquence. Pinckney, a lawyer of much general learning, paraphrased a passage of Burke to the effect that "the spirit of liberty was more high and haughty in the slaveholding colonies than in those to the northward." He also planted himself, with others from the South, on state-sovereignty, afterwards more commonly called "state-rights," and in time tortured into a doctrine which led to nullification—Secession—War.