THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

WHAT IT SAID

• The Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress
• The Missouri Compromise involved primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories.
• It prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri.

DEVELOPMENT IN CONGRESS

• To balance the number of "slave states" and "free states," the northern region of what was then Massachusetts ultimately gained admittance into the United States as a free state to become Maine.
• This only occurred as a result of a compromise involving slavery in Missouri, and in the federal territories of the American west.
• A bill to enable the people of the Missouri Territory to draft a constitution and form a government preliminary to admission into the Union came before the House of Representatives in Committee of the Whole, on February 13, 1819.

IMPACT ON POLITICAL DISCOURSE

• During the decades following 1820 Americans hailed the 1820 agreement as an essential compromise almost on the sacred level of the Constitution itself.
• The Civil War broke out in 1861; historians often say the Compromise helped postpone the war.
• These disputes involved the competition between the southern and northern states for power in Congress and for control over future territories.
• There were also the same factions emerging as the Democratic-Republican party began to lose its coherence.
• In an April 22 letter to John Holmes, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the division of the country created by the Compromise Line would eventually lead to the destruction of the Union.

REPEAL

• The provisions of the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north were effectively repealed by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.
• despite efforts made to fight the Act by prominent speakers, including Abraham Lincoln in his Peoria Speech.