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

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?

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.

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!”

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