The Missouri Compromise Essay Example

In 1820, Missouri a slave territory applied for admission to the USA. At that point, there have been twelve free states. If Missouri entered u. s. as an American slave state., the voting balance within the Senate would favor slave states. This might mean laws favoring slavery would more likely be gone by Congress. Abolitionists within the North opposed any laws favoring slavery and favoring the extension of slavery into the western territories. These western territories were recently purchased in 1803 from France for about $15 million called the Louisiana Purchase

To settle any possible dispute between free states and slave states, Congress agreed in 1820 to permit Missouri to become an American state and Maine, an element of Massachusetts, to become a free state. Additionally, a line at the 36 degrees half-hour would divide the remaining Louisiana Territory into free territory north of the road and the slave territory south of the road.

Deciding on free homes and slave homes was huge since it had been likely that eventually enough American settlers moving west into these homes would want representation in Congress. Would Congress extend slavery ever or eventually abolish it? If slavery was abolished would former slaves as citizens be allowed to retain ordnance and conceivably kill their former masters and/or her family members? Would extending slavery mean that the abolitionists might no way see the tip of slavery?

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was held until 1850, when slave catchers were allowed into free territories to capture runaway slaves as a part of the Compromise of 1850, until 1854 when Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois led Congress to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opening the western territory to popular sovereignty meaning anyone living in and/or getting the territories could decide about slavery, and in 1857 when Scott, a runaway slave now taken by a master into free territory, sued for his freedom. The Supreme Court ruled that Scott had no rights since he wasn't a legal citizen. This effectively meant that free states weren't free since slaveowners could legally take their slaves into free territory without much restriction.

The issue of slavery within the territories was constantly like “kicking a can down the road.” While the compromises temporarily settled the slave issue, the compromises never solved it. The resolution to the slavery issue was constantly deferred and never really was resolved until the tip of the war in 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and also the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Who benefited the foremost from the Missouri Compromise? Slave owners. It allowed slavery north of the Mason and Dixon Line for the primary time since the last northern state abolished slavery. It brought another slave state into the union that was far more populous than the northern state that entered, Maine. While it prohibited slavery within the northern section of the Louisiana Purchase, it’s most unlikely that area would have ever been hospitable to slavery anyway since the kind of farm labor needed within the north was very different from the extremely labor-intensive farming exhausted the south. it had been a win for the southern slave owners and therefore the party of slavery, Democrats, in general. it was also the genesis of the war therein the slave decision resulted from a Missouri possessor taking a slave to measuring with him in Illinois, a free state. When that slave, Dred Scott sued for his freedom, the idiotic, racist decision of the Democrats on the Supreme Court made the war almost inevitable.

The compromise achieved several things. First, it established a policy or principle that to stay the federal government stable and stop ideas of secession and sectionalism, the addition of latest states should be balanced between slave states and free states, and it founded a geographic line on which those decisions may well be based. That allowed Maine to enter as a state rather than remaining a part of Massachusetts, at the identical time as Missouri was admitted as an American state. It established that states or future states north or the road, including Iowa, Minnesota, South and North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon would be free states once they were brought into the Union, whereas Texas could be available as an American state. Later attempts to alter the principles led to “Bloody Kansas” with the high-sounding but destructive notion of “popular sovereignty” regarding the problem of slavery or no slavery, and further pushed the problem toward secession and also the war. It also by settling that controversy for the time of the compromise, delayed the escalation of southern/northern sectional disagreements for 40 years, so the war was fought to begin in 1861 and not in 1820 or 1821. During those 40 years the economic development of, and immigration into, the northern states gave those states disproportionate advantages in railroads, factories, and population (not counting the slave population within the south since it officially was only 3/5 per person by the Constitution), so when the war came the Union side had decided advantages and eventually won the war, ended slavery, and kept the Union intact.