With the two houses thus divided, it was apparent that no new State could be admitted, since the Southern party, having control of the Senate, would not vote to admit a free State so long as Missouri was kept out, and Maine was then ready to come in as a free State.
As neither party would yield, the more moderate, or timid, men of each tried to find some intermediate ground where the factions could come together, each giving up something for the sake of restoring harmony to the country. Finally a settlement was reached. Maine came in a free State. Missouri was admitted with slavery, but with the restriction attached that her southern boundary should thenceforward be the limit north of which no new slave States should be formed. Thus the line between freedom and slavery was first strictly drawn on the parallel of 36° 30´, but with a slave State above it. The first battle between the two warring systems had been fought, and slavery had won. The North had got a line, but the South had won a State.
ARKANSAS ADMITTED 1836.
Arkansas was admitted into the Union in 1836, as a slave State, retaining the name it had been given as a Territory, when formed from the Louisiana purchase,—a name originating with the once powerful nation Marquette found seated on the banks of the Mississippi. Thus three slave States had been made out of French Louisiana.
THOMAS H. BENTON'S IDEA.
"There is the East! There lies the road to India."
Lawyer, soldier and politician, but not yet a statesman, Thomas H. Benton went from Tennessee to Missouri after the war with England was over. Though St. Louis was yet only a large village, it was the focus of the activities of the Great West. Mr. Benton saw it was the place for a rising man to grow up in, and accordingly he settled there.
In St. Louis Mr. Benton found an aristocracy of fur-traders, whose attachment for their own usages and old form of government bound them together. They kept their own language and manners. With many it was a point of honor never to learn English at all. In all things they were as distinctively French as the French people of Canada are to-day. Thus this scion of refinement had been grafted on a rude frontier life, but would not assimilate with the coarser elements thrown upon it by emigration from the States.
By the side of this middle-class (bourgeois) aristocracy stood the Catholic clergy, with its traditions of the old régime in Canada, its proud record of discovery and missionary work among the barbarians of these Western wilds, whose every stream and fountain had its story of zeal and heroism to tell.
This was society at the core. The clergy was its rock of support. Boys were taught in the parish school, and girls in a nunnery. So education was as much in the keeping of the Church as religion itself. Nations may change, but the Roman Church never abandons its people or its objects.
Around this foundation was grouped the community of French Creoles, whom the great fur companies employed and who were their dependants. And around them clustered again an increasing population of American adventurers, coming mostly from the Southern States in search of a living, for whom St. Louis was the magnet which attracts to itself the scattered atoms of society far and near.