property not only as a private possession but also as part of a neighborhood. Thus, when a miller built a dam that flooded upriver farms or impaired the fishery, the courts might make him take those interests into account, often in ways that reduced the business uses of his property. By 1830, New England courts routinely granted
the owners of industrial mill sites unrestricted water rights, even when the exercise of those rights inflicted damage on their neighbors. As early as 1805, the New York Supreme Court in Palmer v. Mulligan had asserted that the right to develop property for business purposes was inherent in the ownership of property. In the courts of northern and western states, what was coming to be called “progress” demanded
legal protection for the business uses of private property, even when such uses conflicted with old common-law restraints.
1819
Many traditionalist Jeffersonians disliked these developments, but they could not stop them. That changed in 1819. First, the debate that surrounded Missouri’s
admission as a slave state revealed the centrality and vulnerability of slavery within the national Union. Second, a severe financial collapse led many Americans to
doubt the Market Revolution’s compatibility with the Jeffersonian republic. By
1820, politicians were determined to reconstruct the limited-government, states’-
rights coalition that had elected Thomas Jefferson.
The Argument
Early in 1819, slaveholding Missouri applied for admission
over Missouri
to the Union as the first new state to be carved out of
the Louisiana Purchase. New York Congressman James
Tallmadge, Jr., quickly proposed two amendments to the Missouri statehood bill.
The first would bar additional slaves from being brought into Missouri (16 percent of Missouri’s people were already slaves). The second would emancipate Missouri
slaves born after admission when they reached their 25th birthday. Put simply, the Tallmadge amendments would admit Missouri only if Missouri agreed to become
a free state.
The congressional debates on the Missouri question had little to do with
humanitarian objections to slavery and everything to do with political power. Rufus King of New York, an old Federalist who led the northerners in the Senate, insisted that he opposed the admission of a new slave state “solely in its bearing and effects upon great political interests, and upon the just and equal rights of the freemen of the nation.” Northerners had long chafed at the added representation in Congress
and in the Electoral College that the “three-fifths” rule granted to the slave states (see Chapter 6). The rule had, in fact, added significantly to southern power: In 1790, the South, with 40 percent of the white population, controlled 47 percent of the votes in Congress—enough to decide close votes both in Congress and in presidential elections. Federalists pointed out that of the 12 additional electoral votes the three-fifths rule gave to the South, 10 had gone to Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and
had given him the election. Without the bogus votes provided by slavery, they
argued, Virginia’s stranglehold on the presidency would have been broken with
Washington’s departure in 1796.
1819
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In 1819, the North held a majority in the House of Representatives. The
South, thanks to the recent admissions of Alabama and southern-oriented Illi-
nois, controlled a bare majority in the Senate. The Tallmadge amendments
passed in the House of Representatives by a starkly sectional vote, then went on
to the Senate. There, a unanimous South defeated the Tallmadge amendments
with the help of the two Illinois senators and three northerners. Deadlocked
between a Senate in favor of admitting Missouri as a slave state and a House
dead set against it, Congress broke off one of the angriest sessions in its history and went home.
The Missouri
The new Congress that convened in the winter of 1819–20
Compromise
passed the legislative package that became known as the
Missouri Compromise. Massachusetts offered its northern
counties as the new free state of Maine, thus neutralizing fears that the South
would gain votes in the Senate with the admission of Missouri. Senator Jesse
Thomas of Illinois proposed the so-called Thomas Proviso: If the North would
admit Missouri as a slave state, the South would agree to outlaw slavery in territories above 36°300N latitude—a line extending from the southern border of
Missouri to Spanish (within a year, Mexican) territory. That line would open
Arkansas Territory (present-day Arkansas and Oklahoma) to slavery and would
ban slavery from the remainder of the Louisiana Territory—land that would sub-
sequently become all or part of nine states.
Congress admitted Maine with little debate, but the Thomas Proviso met north-
ern opposition. Finally, a joint Senate–House committee decided to separate the
two bills. With half of the southern representatives and nearly all of the northerners supporting it, the Thomas Proviso passed. Congress next took up the admission of
Missouri. With the votes of a solid South and 14 compromise-minded northerners,
Missouri entered the Union as a slave state. President James Monroe applauded the
“patriotic devotion” of the northern representatives “who preferr’d the sacrifice of themselves at home” to endangering the Union. His words were prophetic: Nearly
all of the 14 were voted out of office in the next election.
The Missouri crisis brought the South’s commitment to slavery and the
North’s resentment of southern political power into collision. While northerners
vowed to relinquish no more territory to slavery, southerners talked openly of
disunion and civil war. A Georgia politician announced that the Missouri debates
had lit a fire that “seas of blood can only extinguish.” President Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, saw the debates as an omen: Northerners
would unanimously oppose the extension of slavery whenever the question came
to a vote. Adams confided in his diary: “Here was a new party ready formed, ...
terrible to the whole Union, but portentiously terrible to the South—threatening
in its progress the emancipation of all their slaves, threatening in its immediate effect that Southern domination which has swayed the Union for the last twenty
years.”
Viewing the crisis from Monticello, the aging Thomas Jefferson was distraught:
“A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; every 382