This agreement allowed Missouri to enter the United States as a slave state and Maine to enter as a free state. The Congress thus maintained the balance between slave and free states. To avoid additional conflicts in the future, the Congress also created the Missouri Compromise line.
All future states north of Missouri's southern border would be free states. Future states south of Missouri's southern border would be slave states. In Ohio, the Missouri Compromise was controversial. It served notice to the North that Southerners not only did not intend for slavery to end, they wanted to expand its presence.
For nearly 30 years, the compromise worked, with two states being admitted together, one slave, one free. Then, in , California was admitted as a stand-alone free state, upsetting the balance 16—15, in exchange for a Congressional guarantee no restrictions on slavery would be placed on the territories of Utah or New Mexico and passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required citizens of all states to return any runaway slaves to their masters. In , the U. Supreme Court ruled Congress had no right to prohibit slavery in territories, as part of the decision in the Dred Scott case.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of repealed the dividing line for slavery in the Louisiana Purchase area. Missouri Compromise. But with all the good that the Louisiana Purchase brought to the United States, it also presented the growing country with a difficult and painful question: Should the states created out of that land be slave or free?
Louisiana had been carved out and accepted as a slave state in , but no other territory had petitioned Congress for statehood out of the purchase lands until Missouri did so in , also wanting to enter the Union as a slave state.
That request threatened to unsettle a delicate balance of 11 slave and 11 free states, a balance both sides found necessary for maintaining equal representation in the Senate. The fledgling abolitionist movement saw a chance to bring its cause to the foreground, and the issue of slavery in Missouri was thrown before the House of Representatives in February when James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to ban slavery within the boundaries of the new state.
Tallmadge also advocated gradual emancipation for the thousands of chattels already living there. It allowed for free, white male citizens of the two territories to decide if they would apply for admission as a free or a slave state.
Violence broke out in Kansas, which delayed its admission to the Union. The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by the Supreme Court in found that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Roger Taney and six other Justices ruled that Missouri Compromise was illegal because Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories, and slave masters were guaranteed property rights under the Fifth Amendment.
He turned the Nebraska Territory into two states Nebraska and Kansas. With the passage of this bill the Missouri Compromise was effectively undone. Sanford, more famously known as the Dred Scott decision, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, officially opening up all new states to slavery. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was more impactful, according to historian Robert Forbes, than the compromise itself.
While it effectively settled the question of slavery from to , its repeal began the sectarian conflict that eventually brought the nation into the Civil War. Popular sovereignty - a doctrine, held chiefly by slave owners, that the people living in a territory should be free of federal interference in determining domestic policy, especially with respect to slavery.
Please Note: You are viewing a legacy website that is no longer being supported. For Educators. Its repeal would bring about conflict that would lead to the Civil War.
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