An Early Threat of Secession:
The Missouri Compromise of
1820 and the Nullification
Process
Guiding Questions
• How did the Missouri Compromise of 1820
attempt to settle the debate over the future
of slavery in the growing American
republic?
• How did the Nullification Crisis a decade
later demonstrate the widening divide
between northern and southern states?
I. The Missouri Compromise
A. The Product
1. Struggle in Congress for regional
control of the national, legislative
process
2. Southern States
a.
b.
Lost majority influence in the House
Slower growing population
3. Equal Representation
a.
b.
James Tallmadge Jr.
Slaveholding states wanted to maintain
equal representation in the Senate with
free states
Especially as new territories and states
were added to the Union
4. Missouri
a. Asked to enter the Union as a slave state in 1819
b. New York Congressman James Tallmadge Jr.
i.
Added a proviso that would ban the importation of slaves
into the state
ii. Would free slaves born after Missouri’s admission at the
age of 25.
c. Southerners in the Senate blocked Tallmadge’s
amendment
i.
Howell Cobb, Georgia, predicting that if Tallmadge insisted
on his amendment, “the Union will be dissolved!”
ii. Tallmadge replied, “If civil war, which gentlemen so much
threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!”
B. The impasse
1. Resolved the following year when
Maine requested entry as a free state.
2. Senator Jesse B. Thomas, Illinois,
offered an amendment that produced
the Missouri Compromise
a.
b.
In the balance of the Louisiana Territory
north of the 36º30’ parallel slavery
would be “forever prohibited.”
Laid out the famous Mason-Dixon line
separating free states from slave states
3. Henry Clay
a.
b.
Became know as “the Great
Compromiser
Instrumental in the 1821 compromise
that actually brought Missouri into the
Union as a slave state
Henry Clay