Louisiana having become a State in 1812, that portion of the purchase
north of the thirty-third degree took the name of the Missouri
Territory. St. Louis was its centre of population and of influence.
[1818]
Being found in this extensive domain at the purchase, slavery had never
been hindered in its growth. It had therefore taken firm root and was
popular. The application, early in 1818, of the densest part of Missouri
Territory for admission into the Union as a slave State, called
attention to this threatening status of slavery beyond the Mississippi,
and occasioned in Congress a prolonged, able, angry, and momentous
debate. Jefferson, still alive, wrote, "The Missouri question is the
most portentous which has ever threatened the Union. In the gloomiest
hour of the Revolutionary War I never had apprehensions equal to those
which I feel from this source."
To see the bearing of the tremendous question thus raised, we have need
of a retrospect. Property in man is older than history and has been
nearly universal. It cannot be doubted that in an early stage of human
development slavery is a means of furthering civilization. Negro slavery
originated in Africa, spread to Spain before the discovery of America,
to America soon after, and from the Spanish colonies to the English. The
first notice we have of it in English America is that in
1619 a Dutch ship landed twenty blacks at Jamestown for sale. The Dutch
West India Company began importing slaves into Manhattan in 1626. There
were slaves in New England by 1637. Newport was subsequently a great
harbor for slavers. Georgia offered the strongest resistance to the
introduction of the system, but it was soon overcome. Till about 1700,
Virginia had a smaller proportion of slave population than some northern
colonies, and the change later was mostly due to considerations not of
morality but of profit. Anti-slavery cries were indeed heard from an
early period, but they were few and faint. Penn held slaves, though
ordering their emancipation at his death. Whitfield thought slavery to
be of God. But its most culpable abettor was the English Government,
moved by the profits of the slave trade. A Royal African Company, with
the Duke of York, afterward James II., for some time its president, was
formed to monopolize this business, which monarchs and ministries
furthered to the utmost of their power.
Thus the Revolution found slavery in all the colonies, north as well as
south. But it was then, so far south as Virginia, thought to be an evil.
That commonwealth had passed many laws to restrain it, but the King had
commanded the Governor not to assent to any of them. The Legislature,
replying, stigmatized the traffic as inhuman and a threat to the very
existence of the colony. Hostility extended from the trade to slavery
itself. Jefferson was for emancipation with deportation, and trembled
for his country as he reflected upon the wrong of slavery and the
justice of God. Patrick Henry, George Mason, Peyton Randolph,
Washington, Madison, in a word all the great Virginians of the time held
similar views.
The Quakers of Pennsylvania were, however, the most aggressive of
slavery's foes. So early as 1775 a society, the first in America if not
in the world for promoting its abolition, was formed in Pennsylvania. In
1789 it was incorporated, with Franklin for president. Similar
organizations soon rose in several northern States, numbering among
their members many of the most eminent men in the land. The British
Abolition Society, formed in 1787, and the labors of Wilberforce,
Clarkson, and Zachary Macaulay against the slave trade in the West
Indies, had influence here, as had still more the French Assembly's bold
proclamation of the Rights of Man.
The Ordinance of 1787 for the Northwest Territory marked a most decisive
point in the history of slavery. By its decree, in Jefferson's language,
there was never to be either slavery or involuntary servitude in the
said territory otherwise than in punishment for crimes. It is to the
everlasting honor of the southern members then in the Continental
Congress that they all voted for this inhibition. Virginia, whose assent
as a State was necessary to its validity, she having at this time rights
over much of the domain in question, also concurred. Whatever the
strictly legal weight of this prohibition over the immense Louisiana
purchase, it certainly aided much in confirming freedom as the
presupposition and maxim of our law over all our national territory.
Vermont had never recognized slavery save to prohibit it in its first
constitution. In New Hampshire it existed but nominally. The
Massachusetts constitution of 1780 virtually ended it in that State.
Gradual abolition statutes passed in Pennsylvania in 1780, in Rhode
Island and Connecticut in 1784. The constitution made it possible to
forbid the importation of slaves in 1808. A national law to that effect
was passed in 1807, making the trade illegal and affixing to it heavy
penalties. The American Colonization Society was formed in 1816 for the
purpose of negro deportation. It did little of this, but rendered some
service toward carrying out the act against slave importation. A new law
in 1820, which made this traffic piracy, punishable with death, was
partly due to its influence. Also many, like Birney, Gerrit Smith and
the Tappans, who began as colonizationists, subsequently became
abolitionists.
Notwithstanding all these influences slavery increased in strength every
year. South Carolina and Georgia were finding it exceedingly profitable
for cotton and rice culture, and the income from slave traffic into the
vast opening lands of Tennessee and Kentucky constituted an irresistible
temptation. In spite of the law of 1807 and of the indescribable horrors
of the business, even the foreign slave trade went on. The institution
found many defenders in the Federal Convention of 1787, and in the first
and subsequent Congresses. The pleas began to be raised, so current
later, that the negro was an inferior being, slavery God's ordinance, a
blessing to slaves and masters alike, and emancipation a folly. Now
began also that policy of bravado by which, for sixty years, the friends
of slavery bullied their opponents into shameful inaction upon that
accursed thing politically as well as morally, which was so nearly to
cost the nation its life. Thus stood matters when the Missouri
Compromise was mooted in the national Legislature.
We hardly need say that this strife ended in a compromise. Missouri was
created a slave State, balanced by Maine as a free State, but at the
same time slavery was to be excluded forever from all the remainder of
the Louisiana purchase north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, the southern
line of Virginia and Kentucky as well as of Missouri itself. The land
between Missouri and Louisiana had been in 1819 erected into the
"Territory of Arkansaw."
In the memorable discussion over this issue, involving the country as
well as Congress, two sorts of argumentation were heard in favor of the
suit of Missouri. The genuine pro-slavery men urged the sacredness of
property as such, and the special sacredness of property-right in slaves
as tacitly guaranteed by the Constitution. They also made much of the
third article of the Louisiana purchase treaty. This read as follows:
"The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the
Union of the United States and admitted as soon as possible, according
to the principles of the Federal Constitution, to the enjoyment of all
the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States;
and in the meantime they shall be maintained and protected in the free
enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion which they
profess."
There were with these, men who acted from mere policy, thinking it best
to admit the slave State because of the difficulty and also the danger
to the Union of suppressing slavery there. They appealed as well to the
sacred compromises in the Constitution, meaning the permission at first
to import slaves, the three-fifths rule for slave representation in
Congress, and the fugitive slave clause. They spoke much of the
necessity of preserving the balance of power within the Union, and of
Congress's inaction as to slavery in the Louisiana purchase hitherto,
and also in Florida. These arguments won many professed foes of slavery,
as Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Quincy Adams. In all Congress Clay was
the most earnest pleader for the compromise.
To all these arguments the unbending friends of free soil replied that
property right was subordinate to the national good, and that Congress
had full power over territorial institutions and should never have
permitted slavery to curse the domain in question. If it had committed
error in the past, that could not excuse continuance in error. The terms
of the Louisiana purchase, it was further urged, could not, even if they
had been meant to do so, which was not true, detract from this sovereign
power. It was pointed out that in every case in which a State had been
admitted thus far, Congress had prescribed conditions. It was boldly
said, still further, that if slavery threatened disunion unless allowed
its way, it ought all the more to be denied its way.
The chief strength of slavery in this crisis lay in the distressing
practical difficulty, if the prayer of Missouri were refused, of dealing
with slaves and slave proprietorship there, and of quieting a numerous
and spirited population bent upon statehood and slavery together. The
more decided foes of slavery did not sufficiently consider these
complications. Nor did they duly reflect upon the sweeping triumph which
freedom had withal secured in the pledge that the vast bulk of the
Louisiana purchase should be forever free. The pledge was indeed broken
in 1854, but not until such a sense of its sacredness had been impressed
upon the country that the breach availed slavery nothing.