US History: Missouri Compromise?

Question

A question that I am stumped on, and any help would be deeply appreciated!

How did the Missouri Compromise relate both to the existing territorial status of slavery and to its possible future expansion to the West?

Answer 1

First half of answer:

The Missouri Compromise, also called the Compromise of 1820, was an agreement passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories. It prohibited slavery for all new states north of the 36°30' line, or the border of the Arkansas territory (excluding Missouri). Prior to the agreement, the House of Representatives had refused to accept this boundary and a conference committee was appointed. The United States Senate refused to concur in the amendment, and the whole measure was lost. During the following session (1819-1820), the House passed a similar bill with an amendment introduced on January 26, 1820 by John W. Taylor of New York allowing Missouri into the union as a slave state. In the meantime, the question had been complicated by the admission in December of Alabama, a slave state (the number of slave and free states now becoming equal), and by the passage through the House (January 3, 1820) of a bill to admit Maine as a free state.

The Senate decided to connect the two measures, and passed a bill for the admission of Maine with an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to form a state constitution. Before the bill was returned to the House, a second amendment was adopted on the motion of Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, excluding slavery from the Missouri Territory north of 36°30' (the southern boundary of Missouri), except within the limits of the proposed state of Missouri. The House of Representatives refused to accept this and a conference committee was appointed.

That's from Wikipedia.

For the rest, go to infoplease.com or u-s-history.com

What a concept! Doing your own research!

Answer 2

The Missouri compromise of 1820 simply states that no slave state will be admitted to the union north of the southern Missouri border of 36' 30'' lattitude. At the time the compromise was made the only states that could be admitted were the Arkansas Territory , and the unorganized territory of Oklahoma. What it did was effectively stop the expansion of slavery in America . But the problem with this is America expanded first with the Florida annexation in 1820 then with the addition of Texas in 1845 the Mexican Session of 1848 and the Gadgesan Purchase of 1853. This created a vast area that was open to slavery under said compromise. This meant that the attempt to stop the spread of slavery was thawarted by manifast destiny.

Answer 3

The Missouri Compromise - no European country paid attention to the Monroe Doctrine. What was associated with the Monroe Doctrine were important 1) Polk Corollary and Roosevelt Corollary (Theodore Roosevelt). These two additions to the Monroe Doctrine were backed up by force, and everyone understood them.

Answer 4

As people moved west, the question of whether new states would be slave or free each threatened to upset the balance between North and South.

Answer 5

The Missouri Compromise, also called the Compromise of 1820, was an agreement passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories. It prohibited slavery for all new states north of the 36°30' line, or the border of the Arkansas territory (excluding Missouri). Prior to the agreement, the House of Representatives had refused to accept this boundary and a conference committee was appointed. The United States Senate refused to concur in the amendment, and the whole measure was lost. During the following session (1819-1820), the House passed a similar bill with an amendment introduced on January 26, 1820 by John W. Taylor of New York allowing Missouri into the union as a slave state. In the meantime, the question had been complicated by the admission in December of Alabama, a slave state (the number of slave and free states now becoming equal), and by the passage through the House (January 3, 1820) of a bill to admit Maine as a free state.

The Senate decided to connect the two measures, and passed a bill for the admission of Maine with an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to form a state constitution. Before the bill was returned to the House, a second amendment was adopted on the motion of Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, excluding slavery from the Missouri Territory north of 36°30' (the southern boundary of Missouri), except within the limits of the proposed state of Missouri. The House of Representatives refused to accept this and a conference committee was appointed.


Impact on Political Discourse
These disputes, involving as they did the question of the relative powers of Congress and the states, tended to turn the Democratic-Republicans, who were becoming nationalized, back again toward their old state sovereignty principles and to prepare the way for the Jacksonian-Democratic Party nationalistic element that was soon to emerge as National Republicans, elements of which then evolved into the Whigs during Andrew Jackson's Presidency.

In an April 22 letter to John Holmes, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the division of the country created by the Compromise line would eventually lead to the destruction of the Union:

"...this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. 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; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper."
On the constitutional side, the Compromise of 1820 was important as the first precedent for the congressional exclusion of slavery from public territory acquired since the adoption of the Constitution, and also as a clear recognition that Congress has no right to impose upon a state asking for admission into the Union conditions which do not apply to those states already in the Union.

Following Missouri's admission to the Union in 1821, no other states were admitted until 1836 when Arkansas became a slave state, followed by Michigan in 1837 as a free state.

The 1857 Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, ruled the first Compromise unconstitutional (while ratifying the second Compromise's proposition that persons of African descent could not be U.S. citizens), inflaming antislavery sentiment in the North and contributing to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861


Second Missouri Compromise
There was now a controversy between the two houses not only on the slavery issue, but also on the parliamentary question of the inclusion of Maine and Missouri within the same bill. The committee recommended the enactment of two laws, one for the admission of Maine, the other an enabling act for Missouri without any restrictions on slavery but including the Thomas amendment. This was agreed to by both houses, and the measures were passed, and were signed by President James Monroe respectively, on March 5 and on March 6 of 1820. When the question of the final admission of Missouri came up during the session of 1820-1821, the struggle was revived over a clause in the new constitution (1820) requiring the exclusion of "free negroes and mulattoes" from the state. Through the influence of Henry Clay, an act of admission was finally passed, upon the condition that the exclusionary clause of the Missouri constitution should "never be construed to authorize the passage of any law" impairing the privileges and immunities of any U.S. citizen. This deliberately ambiguous provision is sometimes known as the Second Missouri Compromise. Although not explicitly intended to do so, it could (and would) be interpreted to indicate that blacks and mulattos did not qualify as citizens of the United States. This had a direct relationship with the Dred Scott v. Sandford case.


compromise 1850
The Compromise of 1850 (also called the Pearce Act) was a series of Congressional legislative actions to regulate the spread of slavery in the territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846–48). In five laws balancing the interests of the slaveholding states of the American South and the free states, California was admitted as a free state, Texas received financial compensation for relinquishing claim to lands east of the Rio Grande in what is now New Mexico, the United States territory of New Mexico (including present-day Arizona and Utah) was organized without any specific prohibition of slavery, the slave trade (but not slavery itself) was abolished in Washington, D.C., and the stringent Fugitive Slave Law was passed, requiring all U.S. citizens to assist in the return of runaway slaves.

The measures, brokered largely by Stephen Douglas, with support from United States Senate luminaries Henry Clay, known to American history as "The Great Compromiser," and Daniel Webster, one of the United States' most famous orators, with the influence of the Fillmore Administration (and opposition of the Taylor Administration), temporarily defused sectional tensions in the United States, postponing the secession crisis and the American Civil War. However, its rejection of the Wilmot Proviso, which had banned slavery in Federal territories, in favor of the doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty" for New Mexico and Utah, was a departure from the method of addressing slavery in the territories that had been created in the Missouri Compromise in 1820. The political peace achieved by the Compromise of 1850 lasted only four years, until it was shattered by the divisive Kansas-Nebraska Act.

FOR MORE INFO GO TO WIKIPEDIA TYPE COMPROMISE 1850