An Early Threat of Secession: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Nullification Process

1. An Early Threat of Secession: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Nullification Process

2. Guiding Questions • How did the Missouri Compromise of 1820 attempt to settle the debate over the future of slavery in the growing American republic? • How did the Nullification Crisis a decade later demonstrate the widening divide between northern and southern states?

3. The Missouri Compromise • The Product • Struggle in Congress for regional control of the national, legislative process • Southern States • Lost majority influence in the House • Slower growing population • Equal Representation • Slaveholding states wanted to maintain equal representation in the Senate with free states • Especially as new territories and states were added to the Union James Tallmadge Jr.

4. Missouri • Asked to enter the Union as a slave state in 1819 • New York Congressman James Tallmadge Jr. • Added a proviso that would ban the importation of slaves into the state • Would free slaves born after Missouri’s admission at the age of 25. • Southerners in the Senate blocked Tallmadge’s amendment • Howell Cobb, Georgia, predicting that if Tallmadge insisted on his amendment, “the Union will be dissolved!” • Tallmadge replied, “If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!”

5. The impasse • Resolved the following year when Maine requested entry as a free state. • Senator Jesse B. Thomas, Illinois, offered an amendment that produced the Missouri Compromise • In the balance of the Louisiana Territory north of the 36º30’ parallel slavery would be “forever prohibited.” • Laid out the famous Mason-Dixon line separating free states from slave states • Henry Clay • Became know as “the Great Compromiser • Instrumental in the 1821 compromise that actually brought Missouri into the Union as a slave state Henry Clay