Tabla de Contenidos
The Missouri Compromise was the first of the major attempts by the United States Congress during the 19th century aimed at easing regional tensions over the issue of slavery. While the agreement achieved its immediate goal, it only served to postpone the eventual crisis that would ultimately divide the nation and lead to the Civil War.
Background and establishment of commitment
After the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1776, various colonial territories were declared states and joined the Union. As more territories were stateized, the issue of slavery was left in the hands of each one, since there were no intentions of adding differences to those that already existed between the former colonies.
After 1816, the Missouri Territory applied to be declared a state, but Congress ignored the request because they did not want to add to the Union a territory where slavery was legal. If Missouri is accepted, this territory would tip the balance of power by giving slave states more votes in the Senate.
Given this, a bill was proposed in the House of Representatives that asked Missouri to gradually eliminate slavery. This project was not accepted because other territories had not received a similar request to become part of the Union. After much back and forth on different bills between the House and Senate, the question of Missouri’s statehood came to a head when Massachusetts allowed Maine, one of its districts, to also apply for statehood.
Thus, in 1820 Congress established the Missouri Compromise, an agreement by which Missouri was admitted into the Union as a slave state and Maine as a non-slave state at the same time, so that the balance between slave and free states would remain equal.
The Compromise also provided that Missourians were authorized to form for themselves a state constitution and government, assume any name they saw fit, and form part of the Union on an equal basis with the original states in all respects. In addition, it prohibited slavery above the line of latitude 36º 30′ in the rest of the Louisiana Territory, thus determining precise limits that prevented the expansion of slavery in the future.
The Louisiana Territory, at that time, included areas of the present-day states of Arkansas, a part of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, a part of North Dakota, most of South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota south of the Mississippi River, north Texas, and Louisiana on both sides of the Mississippi River. This huge tract of land had been sold by Napoleon Bonaparte to the United States in 1803.
end of commitment
The Missouri Compromise was maintained for 34 years, until it was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This law allowed these territories, despite their latitudes, to join the Union as slaveholders. The Kansas-Nebraska Act is considered by many historians to have prompted the American Civil War and the formation of a new Republican party; it also triggered a wave of violence between antislavery and slaveholders in Kansas.
In addition to being repealed in 1854, the Missouri Compromise was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857. In its decision, the court denied the right of manumission (release) that a slave had won against the State of Missouri by living lawfully in states that did not allow slavery. The sentence was considered incendiary for its racist proclamations, in which the inferiority of blacks was openly proclaimed, which determined their treatment as merchandise.
Consequences of the end of the commitment
The unconstitutionality of the Missouri compromise from the Dred Scott v. Sandford was seen as an attempt to reassure slave states that their property was safe. However, it resulted in the consolidation of the abolitionist movement and was one of the many causes of the Secession War or American Civil War.
This war broke out in April 1861, when Union nationalist forces, claiming allegiance to the United States Constitution, clashed with secessionists defending the rights of states to expand slavery.
The civil war marked the first great revolution in the field of rights, through the approval of constitutional amendments of what was called the “Era of Reconstruction”, in which slavery was strictly prohibited and non-discrimination was guaranteed. in the right to vote for reasons of race or prior slavery.
Sources
Lastra, A. The Birth of a Nation . Constitutional History, (11): 519-526, 2010.
National Archives. Missouri Compromise (1820) ., nd
Roura, S. The Struggle for Fundamental Rights and Federalism in the United States . Presented to the Congress on Constitutional Rights and the Autonomous State of the Universities of Barcelona, Rovira I Virgili and Girona, October 20-22, 1999, Barcelona/Tarragona, Spain.
United States Senate. Missouri Compromise Ushers in New Era for the Senate ., nd
