Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 Part 6

The distress brought about by the panic of 1819, the popular antagonism to the banks in general, and especially to the Bank of the United States, as "engines of aristocracy," oppressive to the common people, and the general discontent with the established order, had, as we have seen, produced a movement comparable to the populist agitation of our own time.

Upon the general government the first effect of this period of distress was a general reduction of the revenue. Imports fell from about $121,000,000 in 1818 to $87,000,000 in 1819. Customs receipts, Which in 1816 were over $36,000,000, were but $13,000,000 in 1821.

Receipts for public lands, which amounted to $3,274,000 in 1819, were but $1,635,000 in 1820. In December, 1819, Crawford, the secretary of the treasury, was obliged to announce a deficit which required either a reduction in expenditures or an increase in revenue. Congress provided for two loans, one of $3,000,000 in 1820, and another of $5,000,000 in 1821. A policy of retrenchment was vigorously inst.i.tuted, leveled chiefly at the department of war.

Internal improvement schemes which had been urged in Congress in 1818 were now temporarily put to rest. With the year 1822, however, conditions brightened, and the treasury began a long term of prosperity. [Footnote: Dewey, Financial Hist. of the U. S., 168.]

One of the most important results of the crisis was the complete reorganization of the system of disposal of the public lands. The public domain was more than a source of revenue to the general government; it was one of the most profoundly influential factors in shaping American social conditions. The settler who entered the wilderness with but a small capital, or who became a squatter on the public lands without legal t.i.tle, was impatient with the policy which made revenue the primary consideration of the government.

Benton expressed this view in 1826, [Footnote: Register of Debates, 19 Cong., I Sess., I., 727.] when he said: "I speak to statesmen, and not to compting clerks; to Senators, and not to Quaestors of provinces; to an a.s.sembly of legislators, and not to a keeper of the King's forests. I speak to Senators who know this to be a Republic, not a Monarchy; who know that the public lands belong to the People and not to the Federal Government." The effect of the credit system had been, as we have seen, to stimulate speculation and to plunge the settlers deeply in debt to the general government.

By 1820 these payments for the public lands were over twenty-two million dollars in arrears. Relief measures pa.s.sed by Congress from time to time had extended the period of payment and made other concessions. Now the government had to face the problem of reconstructing its land laws or of continuing the old credit system and relentlessly expelling the delinquent purchasers from their hard-won homes on the public domain. Although the legal t.i.tle remained in the government, the latter alternative was so obviously dangerous and inexpedient that Congress pa.s.sed two new acts. The first [Footnote: U. S. Statutes at Large, III., 566.] (April 24, 1820) reduced the price of land from two dollars to one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, abolished the system of credit, and provided that lands might be purchased in multiples of eighty acres.

Thus the settler with one hundred dollars could secure full t.i.tle to a farm. This was followed by a relief act (March 2, 1821), recommended by Secretary Crawford, [Footnote: Am. State Papers., Finance, III., 551, 718; U. S. Statutes at Large, III., 566.]

allowing previous purchasers to relinquish their claims to land for which they had not paid, and apply payments already made to full purchase of a portion of the land to be retained by the buyer, all overdue interest to be remitted. [Footnote: Ibid., III., 612.] It is significant that this system was not unlike the relief system which had been so popular in the west.

This adjustment of the land question by no means closed the agitation. A few years later Benton repeatedly urged Congress to graduate the price of public lands according to their real value, and to donate to actual settlers lands which remained unsold after they had been offered at fifty cents an acre. [Footnote: Speech in the Senate, May 16, 1826, Meigs, Benton, 163-170.] The argument rested chiefly on the large number of men unable to secure a farm even under the cheaper price of 1820; the great quant.i.ty of public land which remained unsold after it had been offered; the advantage to the revenues from filling the vacant lands with a productive population; and the injustice to the western states, which found themselves unable to obtain revenue by taxing unsold public lands and which were limited in their power of eminent domain and jurisdiction as compared with the eastern states, which owned their public lands. In this agitation lay the germs of the later homestead system, as well as of the propositions to relinquish the federal public lands to the states within which they lay.

With manufacturers in distress, thousands of operatives out of employment, and the crops of parts of the middle states and the west falling in price to a point where it hardly paid to produce them, an appeal to Congress to raise the duties established by the tariff of 1816 [Footnote: Babc.o.c.k, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.). chap.

xiv.] was inevitable. Hence, in the spring of 1820 a new tariff bill was presented by Baldwin, of Pennsylvania, the member from Pittsburgh. He came from a city which felt the full effects of the distress of the manufacturers, especially those of iron and gla.s.s, and which was one of the important centers of the great grain- raising area of the middle states and the Ohio Valley.

Baldwin believed that the time had arrived when, "all the great interests of the country being equally prostrate, and one general scene of distress pervading all its parts," there should be a common effort to improve conditions by a new tariff, intended not for the sake of restoring the depleted treasury, but distinctly for protection. Its advocates proposed to meet the failure of the system of revenue, not by encouraging importations, but by internal taxes and excises on the manufactured goods protected by the impost.

Additional revenue would be secured by higher duties on sugar, mola.s.ses, coffee, and salt. The bill increased ad valorem duties by an amount varying from twenty-five to sixty-six per cent, additional. For woolen and cotton manufactures the rate of additional duty was about one-third; on hemp, an important product in Kentucky, about two-thirds. Duty on forged iron bars was increased from seventy-five cents to one dollar and twenty-five cents per hundred-weight. On many other articles the increase of duty amounted to from twenty to one hundred per cent.

Naturally the home-market argument played an important part in the debates. It was relied upon especially by Henry Clay in his closing speech, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., I Sess., II., 3034.]

in which he argued that the rapidity of growth of the United States as compared with Europe made the ratio of the increase of her capacity of consumption to that of our capacity of production as one to four. Already he thought Europe was showing a want of capacity to consume our surplus; in his opinion, cotton, tobacco, and bread- stuffs had already reached the maximum of foreign demand. From this he argued that home manufactures should be encouraged to consume the surplus, and that some portion of American industry should be diverted from agriculture to manufacturing.

Industrial independence also required this action. England had recently imposed new duties on wool and cotton, and her corn laws contributed to limit her demand for our flour. "I am, too," he said, "a friend of free trade, but it must be a free trade of perfect reciprocity. If the governing considerations were cheapness; if national independence were to weigh nothing; if honor nothing; why not subsidize foreign powers to defend us?" He met the argument of the deficiency of labor and of the danger of developing overcrowded and pauperized manufacturing centers by reasoning that machinery would enable the Americans to atone for their lack of laborers; and that while distance and attachment to the native soil would check undue migration of laborers to the west, at the same time the danger of congestion in the east would be avoided by the attraction of the cheap western lands.

Lowndes, of South Carolina, who with Calhoun had been one of the prominent supporters of the tariff in 1816, now made the princ.i.p.al speech in opposition: he denied the validity of the argument in favor of a home market and contended that the supply of domestic grain would in any case exceed the demand; and that, however small the export, the price of the portion sent abroad would determine that of the whole. It is important to observe that the question of const.i.tutionality was hardly raised. The final vote in the House (April 29, 1820) stood 91 to 78. New England gave 18 votes in favor and 17 opposed; the middle region, including Delaware, gave 56 votes for and 1 vote against; the south, including Maryland and her sister states on the southern seaboard, gave 5 votes in favor and 50 opposed. The northwest gave its 8 votes in favor, and the southwest, including Kentucky, gave 4 votes in favor and 10 opposed. The vote of New England was the most divided of that of any section. From the manufacturing states of Connecticut and Rhode Island but one member, a Connecticut man, voted in opposition to the bill. The only 3 negative votes from Ma.s.sachusetts proper came from the commercial region of Boston and Salem. That portion of Ma.s.sachusetts soon to become the state of Maine gave 4 votes in opposition and only 2 in favor, the latter coming from the areas least interested in the carrying-trade. New Hamps.h.i.+re and Vermont gave their whole vote in opposition, except for one affirmative from Vermont. Kentucky's vote was 4 in favor to 3 opposed, Speaker Clay not voting.

In general, the distribution of the vote shows that the maritime interests united with the slave-holding planters, engaged in producing tobacco, cotton, and sugar, in opposition. On the other side, the manufacturing areas joined with the grain and wool raising regions of the middle and western states to support the measure.

From the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, casting altogether 65 votes, but one man voted against the bill, and he was burned in effigy by his const.i.tuents and resigned the same year. Of the 53 votes cast by the south and southwest, outside of the border states of Maryland and Kentucky, there were but 5 affirmative votes. It is seen, therefore, that in the House of Representatives, on the tariff issue, the middle states and the Ohio Valley were combined against the south and southwest, while New England's influence was nullified by her division of interests. By a single vote, on a motion to postpone, the measure failed in the Senate; but the struggle was only deferred.

The most important aspect of the panic of 1819 was its relation to the forces of unrest and democratic change that were developing in the United States. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams, conversing in the spring of 1820 upon politics, had the gloomiest apprehensions. There had been, within two years, Calhoun said, "an immense revolution of fortunes in every part of the Union; enormous numbers of persons utterly ruined; mult.i.tudes in deep distress; and a general ma.s.s of disaffection to the Government not concentrated in any particular direction, but ready to seize upon any event and looking out anywhere for a leader." They agreed that the Missouri question and the debates on the tariff were merely incidental to this state of things, and that this vague but wide-spread discontent, caused by the disordered circ.u.mstances of individuals, had resulted in a general impression that there was something radically wrong in the administration of the government. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 128; cf. IV., 498.] Although this impression was the result of deeper influences than those to which it was attributed by these statesmen, yet the crisis of 1819, which bore with peculiar heaviness upon the west and south, undoubtedly aggravated all the discontent of those regions. To the historian the movement is profoundly significant, for ultimately it found its leader in Andrew Jackson. More immediately it led to the demand for legislation to prevent imprisonment for debt, [Footnote: See, for example, Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 2 Sess., 1224; McMaster, United States, IV., 532-535.] to debates over a national bankruptcy law, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 2 Sess., I., 757, 759, 792, 1203 et pa.s.sim.] to the proposal of const.i.tutional amendments leading to the diminution of the powers of the supreme court, to a rea.s.sertion of the sovereignty of the states, [Footnote: See chap. viii., below.]

and to new legislation regarding the public lands and the tariff.

The next few years bore clear evidence of the deep influence which this period of distress had on the politics and legislation of the country.

CHAPTER X

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE (1819-1821)

In the dark period of the commercial crisis of 1819, while Congress was considering the admission of Missouri, the slavery issue flamed out, and revealed with startling distinctness the political significance of the inst.i.tution, fateful and ominous for the nation, transcending in importance the temporary financial and industrial ills.

The advance of settlement in the United States made the slavery contest a struggle for power between sections, marching in parallel columns into the west, each carrying its own system of labor.

[Footnote: For previous questions of slavery, see Channing, Jeffersonian System (Am. Nation, XII.), chap. viii.] By 1819 the various states of the north, under favorable conditions of climate and industrial life, had either completely extinguished slavery or were in the process of emanc.i.p.ation [Footnote: See map, p. 6.] and by the Ordinance of 1787 the old Congress had excluded the inst.i.tution in the territory north of the Ohio River. Thus Mason and Dixon's line and the Ohio made a boundary between the slave-holding and the free streams of population that flowed into the Mississippi Valley. Not that this line was a complete barrier: the Ordinance of 1787 was not construed to free the slaves already in the old French towns of the territory; and many southern masters brought their slaves into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois by virtue of laws which provided for them under the fiction of indented servants. [Footnote: Harris, Negro Servitude in Ill., 10; Durm, Indiana, chaps. ix., x.]

Indeed, several efforts were made in the territory of Indiana at the beginning of the nineteenth century to rescind the prohibition of 1787; but to this pet.i.tion Congress, under the strange leaders.h.i.+p of John Randolph, gave a negative; [Footnote: Ibid., chap, xii.; Hinsdale, Old Northwest, chap, xviii.] and, after a struggle between the southern slavery and antislavery elements by which the state had been settled, Indiana entered the Union in 1816 as a free state, under an agreement not to violate the Ordinance of 1787.

Illinois, on her admission in 1818, also guaranteed the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, and, not without a contest, included in her const.i.tution an article preventing the introduction of slavery, but so worded that the system of indenture of Negro servants was continued in a modified form. The issue of slavery still continued to influence Illinois elections, and, as the inhabitants saw well- to-do planters pa.s.s with their slaves across the state to recruit the property and population of Missouri, a movement (1823-1824) in favor of revising their const.i.tution so as to admit slavery required the most vigorous opposition to hold the state to freedom. The leader of the antislavery forces in Illinois was a Virginian, Governor Coles (once private secretary to President Madison), who had migrated to free his slaves after he became convinced that it was hopeless to make the fight which Jefferson advised him to carry on in favor of gradual emanc.i.p.ation in his native state. [Footnote: Harris, Negro Servitude in III., chap. iv.; Washburne, Coles, chaps, iii., v.] In both Indiana and Illinois, the strength of the opposition to slavery and indented servitude came from the poorer whites, particularly from the Quaker and Baptist elements of the southern stock, and from the northern settlers.

In Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, ever since the decline of the tobacco culture, a strong opposition to slavery had existed, shown in the votes of those states on the Ordinance of 1787, and in the fact that as late as 1827 the great majority of the abolition societies of the United States were to be found in this region.

[Footnote: Dunn, Indiana, 190; Ba.s.settin Johns Hopkins Univ.

Studies, XVI., No. vi.; cf. Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. xi.] But the problem of dealing with the free Negro weighed upon the south. Even in the north these people were unwelcome. They frequently became a charge upon the community, and they were placed under numerous disabilities. [Footnote: McMaster, United States, IV., 558; Gordy, Political Hist, of U. S., II., 405.]

The idea of deporting freedmen from the United States found support both among the humanitarians, who saw in it a step towards general emanc.i.p.ation, and among the slave-holders who viewed the increase of the free Negroes with apprehension. To promote this solution of the problem, the Colonization Society [Footnote: McPherson, Liberia; McMaster, United States, IV., 556 et seq.] was incorporated in 1816, and it found support, not only from antislavery agitators like Lundy, who edited the "Genius of Universal Emanc.i.p.ation" at Baltimore, but also from slave-holders like Jefferson, Clay, and Randolph. It was the design of this society to found on the coast of Africa a colony of free blacks, brought from the United States.

Although, after unsuccessful efforts, Liberia was finally established in the twenties, with the a.s.sistance of the general government (but not under its jurisdiction), it never promoted state emanc.i.p.ation. Nevertheless, at first it met with much sympathy in Virginia, where in 1820 the governor proposed to the legislature the use of one-third of the state revenue as a fund to promote the emanc.i.p.ation and deportation of the Negroes. [Footnote: Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 173, 178; Niles' Register, XVII., 363; King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 342; Adams, Memoirs, IV., 293.]

The unprofitableness of slavery in the border states, where outworn fields, the decline of tobacco culture, and the compet.i.tion of western lands bore hard on the planter, [Footnote: See chap. iv.

above; Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. iv.]

now became an argument in favor of, permitting slavery to pa.s.s freely into the new country of the west. Any limitation of the area of slavery would diminish the value of the slaves and would leave the old south to support, under increasingly hard conditions, the redundant and unwelcome slave population in its midst. The hard times from 1817 to 1820 rendered slave property a still greater burden to Virginia. Moreover, the increase of the proportion of slaves to whites, if slavery were confined to the region east of the Mississippi, might eventually make possible a servile insurrection, particularly if foreign war should break out. All of these difficulties would be met, in the opinion of the south, by scattering the existing slaves and thus mitigating the evil without increasing the number of those in bondage.

It was seen that the struggle was not simply one of morals and of rival social and industrial inst.i.tutions, but was a question of political power between the two great and opposing sections, interested, on the one side, in manufacturing and in the raising of food products under a system of free labor; and, on the other, in the production of the great staples, cotton, tobacco, and sugar, by the use of slave labor. Already the southern section had shown its opposition to tariff and internal improvements, which the majority of, the northern states vehemently favored. In other words, the slavery issue was seen to be a struggle for sectional domination.

At the beginning of the nation in 1790, the population of the north and the south was almost exactly balanced. Steadily, however, the free states drew ahead, until in 1820 they possessed a population of 5,152,000 against 4,485,000 for the slave-holding states and territories; and in the House of Representatives, by the operation of the three-fifths ratio, the free states could muster 105 votes to but 81 for the slave states. Thus power had pa.s.sed definitely to the north in the House of Representatives. The instinct for self- preservation that led the planters to stand out against an apportionment in their legislatures which would throw power into the hands of non-slaveholders now led them to seek for some means to protect the interests of their minority section in the nation as a whole. The Senate offered such an opportunity: by the alternate admission of free and slave states from 1802 to 1818, out of the twenty-two states of the nation eleven were slave-holding and eleven free. If the south retained this balance, the Senate could block the action of the majority which controlled the lower House.

Such was the situation when the application of Missouri for admission as a state in 1819 presented to Congress the whole question of slavery beyond the Mississippi, where freedom and slavery had found a new fighting-ground. East of the Mississippi the Ohio was a natural dividing-line; farther west there appeared no obvious boundary between slavery and freedom. By a natural process of selection, the valleys of the western tributaries of the Mississippi, as far north as the Arkansas and Missouri, in which slaves had been allowed while it was a part of French and Spanish Louisiana (no restraints having been imposed by Congress), received an increasing proportion of the slave-holding planters. It would, in the ordinary course of events, become the area of slave states.

The struggle began in the House of Representatives, when the application of Missouri for statehood was met by an amendment, introduced by Tallmadge of New York, February 13, 1819, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 15 Cong., 2 Sess., I., 1170.] providing that further introduction of slavery be prohibited and that all children born within the state after admission should be free at the age of twenty-five years. [Footnote: See amended form in House Journal, 15 Cong., 2 Sess., 272.] Tallmadge had already showed his att.i.tude on this question when in 1818 he opposed the admission of Illinois under its const.i.tution, which seemed to him to make insufficient barriers to slavery. Brief as was the first Missouri debate, the whole subject was opened up by arguments to which later discussion added but little. The speaker, Henry Clay, in spite of the fact that early in his political career he had favored gradual emanc.i.p.ation in Kentucky, led the opposition to restriction. His princ.i.p.al reliance was upon the arguments that the evils of slavery would be mitigated by diffusion, and that the proposed restriction was unconst.i.tutional. Tallmadge and Taylor, of New York, combated these arguments so vigorously and with such bold challenge of the whole system of slavery in new territories, that Cobb, of Georgia, declared, "You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish." [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 15 Coneg., 2 Sess., I., 1204.]

The first clause of Tallmadge's motion was carried (February 16, 1819) by a vote of 87 to 76, and the second by 82 to 78. [Footnote: Ibid., 1214.] Taylor was emboldened to offer (February 18) to the bill for the organization of Arkansas territory an amendment by which slavery should be excluded, whereupon McLane, of Delaware, tentatively proposed that a line should be drawn west of the Mississippi, dividing the territories between freedom and slavery.

Thus early was the whole question presented to Congress. In the Senate, Tallmadge's amendment was lost (February 27) by a vote of 22 to 16, several northern senators adhering to the south; and Congress adjourned without action. [Footnote: But Arkansas was organized as a territory without restriction.]

The issue was then transferred to the people, and in all quarters of the Union vehement discussions took place upon the question of imposing an anti-slavery restriction upon Missouri. Ma.s.s-meetings in the northern states took up the agitation, and various state legislatures, including Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and even the slave state of Delaware, pa.s.sed resolutions with substantial unanimity against the further introduction of slaves into the territories of the United States, and against the admission of new slave states. Pennsylvania, so long the trusted ally of the south, invoked her sister states "to refuse to covenant with crime"

by spreading the "cruelties of slavery, from the banks of the Mississippi to the sh.o.r.es of the Pacific." From the south came equally insistent protests against restriction. [Footnote: Niles'

Register, XVII., 296, 307, 334, 342-344, 395. 399. 400, 416; Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 5, p. 4.]

No argument in the debate in 1819 was more effective than the speech of Rufus King in the Senate, which was widely circulated as a campaign doc.u.ment expressing the northern view. King's antislavery att.i.tude, shown as early as 1785, when he made an earnest fight to secure the exclusion of slavery from the territories, [Footnote: McLaughlin, Confederation and Const.i.tution (Am. Nation, X.), chap.

vii.] was clearly stated in his const.i.tutional argument in favor of restriction on Missouri, and his speech may be accepted as typical.

[Footnote: Niles' Register, XVII., 215; King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 690.] But it was also the speech of an old-time Federalist, apprehensive of the growth of western power under southern leaders.h.i.+p. He held that, under the power of making all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and other property of the United States, Congress had the right to prohibit slavery in the Louisiana purchase, which belonged to the United States in full dominion. Congress was further empowered, but not required, to admit new states into the Union. Since the Const.i.tution contained no express provision respecting slavery in a new state, Congress could make the perpetual prohibition of slavery a condition of admission. In support of this argument, King appealed to the precedent of the Ordinance of 1787, and of the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, all admitted on the conditions expressed in that ordinance. In admitting the state of Louisiana in 1812, a different group of conditions had been attached, such as the requirement of the use of the English language in judicial and legislative proceedings.

The next question was the effect of the Louisiana treaty, by which the United States had made this promise: "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 const.i.tution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States; and in the mean time they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property and the religion which they profess." [Footnote: U. S. Treaties and Conventions, 332.] King contended that, by the admission of Missouri to the Union, its inhabitants would obtain all of the "federal" rights which citizens of the United States derived from its Const.i.tution, though not the rights derived from the const.i.tutions and laws of the various states. In his opinion, the term PROPERTY did not describe slaves, inasmuch as the terms of the treaty should be construed according to diplomatic usage, and not all nations permitted slavery. In any case, property acquired since the territory was occupied by the United States was not included in the treaty, and, therefore, the prohibition of the future introduction of slaves into Missouri would not affect its guarantees.

Could Missouri, after admission, revoke the consent to the exclusion of slavery under its powers as a sovereign state? Such action, King declared, would be contrary to the obligations of good faith, for even sovereigns were bound by their engagements. Moreover, the judicial power of the United States would deliver from bondage any person detained as a slave in a state which had agreed, as a condition of admission, that slavery should be excluded.

Having thus set forth the const.i.tutional principles, King next took up the expediency of the exclusion of slavery from new states. He struck with firm hand the chord of sectional rivalry in his argument against the injustice to the north of creating new slave-holding states, which would have a political representation, under the "federal ratio," not possessed by the north. Under this provision for counting three-fifths of the slaves, five free persons in Virginia (so he argued) had as much power in the choice of representatives to Congress and in the appointment of presidential electors as seven free persons in any of the states in which slavery did not exist. The disproportionate power and influence allowed to the original slave-holding states was a necessary sacrifice to the establishment of the Const.i.tution; but the arrangement was limited to the old thirteen states, and was not applicable to the states made out of territory since acquired. This argument had been familiar to New England ever since the purchase of Louisiana.

Finally, he argued that the safety of the Union demanded the exclusion of slavery west of the Mississippi, where the exposed and important frontier needed a barrier of free citizens against the attacks of future a.s.sailants.

To the southern mind, King's sectional appeal unblus.h.i.+ngly raised the prospect of the rule of a free majority over a slave-holding minority, the downfall of the ascendancy so long held by the south, and the creation of a new Union, in which the western states should be admitted on terms of subordination to the will of the majority, whose power would thus become perpetual. [Footnote: King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 205, 267, 279, 288, 329, 339-344, 501; Jefferson, Writings (Ford's ed.), X., 162, 172, 280; Tyler, Tylers, I., 316.]

When the next Congress met, in December, 1819, the admission of Alabama was quickly completed; and the House also pa.s.sed a bill admitting Maine to the Union, Ma.s.sachusetts having agreed to this division of the ancient commonwealth, on condition that consent Congress should be obtained prior to March 4, 1820. The Senate, quick to see the opportunity afforded by the situation, combined the bill for the admission of Maine with that for the unrestricted admission of Missouri, a proposition carried (February 16, 1820) by a vote of 23 to 21. Senator Thomas, who represented Illinois, which, as we have seen, was divided in its interests on the question of slavery, and who, as the vote showed, could produce a tie in the Senate, moved a compromise amendment, providing for the admission of Missouri as a slave state and for the prohibition of slavery north of 36 degrees 30' in the rest of the Louisiana purchase; and on the next day his amendment pa.s.sed the Senate by a vote of 34 to 10.

The debate in the Senate was marked by another speech of Rufus King, just re-elected a senator from New York by an almost unanimous vote.

With this prestige, and the knowledge that the states of Pennsylvania and New York stood behind him, he reiterated his arguments with such power that John Quincy Adams, who listened to the debate, wrote in his diary that "the great slave-holders in the House gnawed their lips and clenched their fists as they heard him."

[Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 522; see Cong. Globe, 30 Cong., 2 Sess., App. 63-67.]

The case for the south was best presented by William Pinkney, of Maryland, the leader of the American bar, a man of fas.h.i.+on, but an orator of the first rank. His argument, on lines that the debates had made familiar, was stated with such eloquence, force, and graphic power that it produced the effect of a new presentation.

Waiving the question whether Congress might refuse admission to a state, he held that, if it were admitted, it was admitted into a union of equals, and hence could not be subjected to any special restriction. [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 1 Sess., I., 389 et seq.] Without denying the danger of the extension of slavery, he argued that it was not for Congress to stay the course of this dark torrent. "If you have power," said he, "to restrict the new states on admission, you may squeeze a new-born sovereign state to the size of a pigmy." There would be nothing to hinder Congress "from plundering power after power at the expense of the new states,"

until they should be left empty shadows of domestic sovereignty, in a union between giants and dwarfs, between power and feebleness. In vivid oratory he conjured up this vision of an unequal union, into which the new state would enter, "shorn of its beams," a mere servant of the majority. From the point of view of the political theory of a confederation, his contention had force, and the hot- tempered west was not likely to submit to an inferior status in the Union. Nevertheless, the debates and votes in the Const.i.tutional Convention of 1787 seem to show that the fathers of the Const.i.tution intended to leave Congress free to impose limitations on the states at admission. [Footnote: Elliot, Debates, V., 492.]