Help Please!?

Question

what did Thomas Jefferson mean when he said that he Missouri compromise was not the final sentence on the issue of slavery in the untied states

Answer 1

You have to understand that at the time, as new states were being admitted into the Union, they were admitted as either 'slave' states or 'free' states.

As many of these new states were formed, it threatened the balance of power because many more were 'slave' than 'free'. Northern states were worried that their ability to remain free would be watered down by all the incoming states, and they therefore threatened to just stop admitting new ones. Which was no solution either, really.

This is what the Missouri Compromise was supposed to resolve. It drew a hypothetical line on the map and said that no new state north of the line could be a slave state, with the exception of the new state of Missouri. While many congressmen thought this an excellent resolution to their problems, Jefferson was definitely not one of them. He wrote:

"...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. ... 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."

In other words, he felt that by codifying this dispute into law instead of actually resolving it, it would only make arguments between the north and south worse and worse until it finally tore the Union asunder. And he was proven absolutely correct 41 years later when the American Civil War began!