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On March 6th, 1820 President James Monroe ratified the Missouri Compromise, effectively allowing Missouri into the Union as a slave state, and admitting Maine as a free state. The Missouri Compromise also served to bar slavery both North and West of Missouri. The belief was that the Compromise could calm the factions of pro-slavery and abolitionists, but instead led to further friction.
Hindsight can be 20/20, and unfortunately this proves true for the mistakes that the Missouri Compromise provided as opposed to the problems that its supporters believed it might fix. The nation was in heated debate over the issue of slavery, and this would eventually lead to the argument of state’s rights and the opening of a civil war that would test the strength of the young country. All of this, though, could not have been predicted by the leaders of the nation in 1820. At this point in time, they were trying to find a way to allow cooler heads to prevail and find the compromises that would unify opposing factions.
Unfortunately, the end result is that no one would be happy. The Compromise would effectively be overturned with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed settlers to decide whether slavery would be allowed within their new territories. The Missouri Compromise would become just another futile domino in the chain of history that led to the outbreak of war in 1861. As with many of the stop-gaps that eventually led up to war, the Missouri Compromise would only put off the inevitable decision of whether slavery would or would not be allowed in the United States.
In the end, citizens on both sides of the debate over slavery would be unhappy. Abolitionists wanted to see the end of slavery, or at the very least a containment of it. They viewed the Compromise as an act of good will towards the institution of slavery which they opposed, while slave owners and their sympathizers saw it as an infringement on state rights, as well as a continued attempt to contain and attack their livelihood. As with every compromise and act that attempted to quell the debate over slavery, the Missouri Compromise could only momentarily avoid the question of slavery, and the inevitable war that would soon rock the nation.
Suggested Reading:
Conflict & Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation and the American Civil War, by Roger L. Ransom
Further Reading from Roger L. Ransom
