The Shabbiest Horse Traders Get to Be "Statesmen"

Rep. James Tallmadge of New York introduced on this day 200 years ago the amendment that would bear his name and precipitate a famous inter-sectional controversy. The U.S. Congress was preparing to admit Missouri to the Union, and Tallmadge proposed a gradual ban on human slavery in the new state. Tallmadge's proposal gained considerable traction in the free northern states, whose white freemen had little love for African-American slaves but even less for wealthy slave owners. Public meetings expressed support for the free-state amendment, and the motion gained a majority vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. Southern whites were, shall we say, much less supportive. Their representatives blocked the amendment in the Senate (where free and slave states enjoyed parity), and Southern political leaders demanded that slavery remain legal in Missouri. The highest-ranking Southern white politician, President Monroe, argued that calamity would ensue if Congress blocked slavery's expansion: older states like Virginia could not rid themselves of "surplus" slave laborers, human property would fall in value, and overcrowding in the East would make slave rebellions more likely.

Ultimately, Northern and Southern Congressmen worked out one of their usual shabby compromises. Slavery would remain legal in Missouri and permissible in the new territory of Arkansas, but outlawed in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, which in any event remained firmly in the possession of Native Americans. Northern white politicians would later regard the "Missouri Compromise" as a sacred compact of the Union, and its negotiator, Henry Clay, as their "beau ideal of a statesman." Southern whites would cast the Compromise aside as soon as they felt politically powerful enough to do so.