missouri state representatives

The influence of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, known as "The Great Compromiser", an act of admission was finally passed if the exclusionary clause of the Missouri constitution should "never be construed to authorize the passage of any law" impairing the privileges and immunities of any U.S. citizen. Varon, 2008. p. 40: "the North's demographic edge [in the House] did not translate into control over the federal government, for that edge was blunted by constitutional compromises. If all men were created equal, as Jefferson said, then slaves, as men, were born free and, under any truly republican government, entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The ensuing debates pitted the northern "restrictionists", antislavery legislators who wished to bar slavery from the Louisiana Territory and all future states and territories, and southern "anti-restrictionists", proslavery legislators who rejected any interference by Congress that inhibited slavery expansion. [60][61], Missouri statehood, with the Tallmadge Amendment approved, would have set a trajectory towards a free state west of the Mississippi and a decline in southern political authority. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts surmised that the political configuration for just such a sectional party already existed. On that basis, southern planters immigrated with their chattel to Missouri, and the slave population rose from 3,100 in 1810 to 10,000 in 1820. [89] A bill to enable the people of the Missouri Territory to draft a constitution and form a government preliminary to admission into the Union came before the House of Representatives in Committee of the Whole, on February 13, 1819. ", Wilentz, 2016. p. 101: "The three-fifths clause certainly inflated Southerner's power in the House, not simply in affecting numerous roll-call votes – roughly one in three overall of those recorded between 1795 to 1821—but in shaping the politics of party caucuses... patronage and judicial appointments. As the Constitution, in Article 4, section 4, made a republican government in the states a fundamental guarantee of the Union, the extension of slavery into areas where slavery did not exist in 1787 was not only immoral but unconstitutional. (178,445 sq.km. White Missourians objected to these restrictions, and in 1805, Congress withdrew them. [88], The admission of another slave state would increase southern power when northern politicians had already begun to regret the Constitution's Three-Fifths Compromise. Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the U.S. Confederate States presidential election of 1861, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Missouri_Compromise&oldid=1011009440, United States federal territory and statehood legislation, Political compromises in the United States, Expansion of slavery in the United States, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the New International Encyclopedia, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 8 March 2021, at 15:06. ", Wilentz, 2004. p. 385: "More than thirty years after fighting the three-fifths clause at the Federal Convention, King warmly supported banning slavery in Missouri, restating the Yankee Federalist fear of Southern political dominance that had surfaced at the disgraced Hartford Convention in 1814. [83], The disarray of the Republican ascendancy brought about by amalgamation made fears abound in Southerners that a Free State Party might take shape if Congress failed to reach an understanding over Missouri and slavery and possibly threaten southern pre-eminence. ", Ammons, 1971. pp. [57][58], Northern majorities in the House did not translate into political dominance. Enslaved African Americans accounted for twenty to thirty percent of the non-Native American population in and around the main settlements of St. Louis and Ste. They expressed their dissatisfaction in partisan terms, rather than in moral condemnation of slavery, and the pro-De Witt Clinton-Federalist faction carried on the tradition by posing as antirestrictionists to advance their fortunes in New York politics. The year before, he had objected to the admission of Illinois on the (well-founded) grounds that its constitution did not provide enough assurance that the Northwest Ordinance prohibition on slavery would be perpetuated. Missouri. The left section containing a moon representing a new state and a grizzly bear standing for courage. To admit Missouri as a slave state would tip the balance in the Senate, which is made up of two senators per state, in favor of the slave states. Though ostensibly free-soil, the new state had a constitution that permitted indentured servitude and a limited form of slavery. Brown, 1966, p. 23: "...a new theory of party amalgamation preached the doctrine that party division was bad and that a one-party system best served the national interest" "After 1815, stirred by the nationalism of the post-war era, and with the Federalists in decline, the Republicans took up the Federalist positions on a number of the great public issues of the day, sweeping all before them as they did. The balance was deceptive. ", Ellis, 1996. p. 267: "[The Founders' silence on slavery] was contingent upon some discernible measure of progress toward ending slavery. [66][67], Proslavery Republicans countered that the Constitution had long been interpreted as having relinquished any claim to restricting slavery in the states. ", Ammons, 1971. p. 449: "Certainly no one guessed in February 1819 the extent to which passions would be stirred by the introduction of a bill to permit Missouri to organize a state government. The fulcrum for proslavery forces resided in the Senate, where constitutional compromise in 1787 had provided for two senators per state, regardless of its population. Nevertheless, the Compromise was deeply disappointing to blacks in both the North and the South, as it stopped the Southern progression of gradual emancipation at Missouri's southern border, and it legitimized slavery as a southern institution. The two houses were at odds on the issue of the legality of slavery but also on the parliamentary question of the inclusion of Maine and Missouri in the same bill. ", Brown, 1966. p. 22: "...there ran one compelling idea that virtually united all Southerners, and which governed their participation in national politics. Named after Missouri Indian tribe whose name means "town of the large canoes", Miller, 20 miles southwest of Jefferson City, © 2020 Powered by Digital Properties, LLC, Area: 69,709 sq.mi (180,546 sq.km. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. [33][34] Northern Jeffersonian Republicans formed a coalition across factional lines with remnants of the Federalists. Only later did King and other Federalists begin pursuing broader moral and constitutional indictments of slavery. 266–267: "what most rankled Jefferson [and southern Republicans] about the debate over the Missouri Question was that it was happening at all. The dome, rising 238 feet above ground level and topped by a bronze statue of Ceres, goddess of vegetation, is the first view of Jefferson City for travelers arriving from the north. That occurred only as a result of a compromise involving slavery in Missouri and in the federal territories of the American West. ", Wilentz, 2004. p. 383: "Southerner leaders—of whom virtually all identified as Jeffersonian Republicans—denied that Northerners had any business encroaching on matters related to slavery. [8][9] With the Federalists discredited by the Hartford Convention against the War of 1812, they were in decline nationally, and the "amalgamated" or hybridized Republicans adopted key Federalist economic programs and institutions, further erasing party identities and consolidating their victory. Each rep is assigned a geographic territory, but feel free to contact anyone below. It is unlikely that the ratio before 1820 was decisive in affecting legislation on slavery. The debates in the House's 2nd session in 1819 lasted only three days. "It is well known", the New Hampshire Republican William Plumer, Jr. observed of the restrictionist effort, "that it originated with Republicans, that it is supported by Republicans throughout the free states; and that the Federalists of the South are its warm opponents. Although most Northern Federalists backed restriction, they were hardly monolithic on the issue; indeed, in the first key vote on Tallmadge's amendments over Missouri, the proportion of Northern Republicans who backed restriction surpassed that of Northern Federalists. The Missouri Compromise was very controversial, and many worried that the country had become lawfully divided along sectional lines. [98][99], The debate over admission of Missouri also raised the issue of sectional balance, as the country was equally divided between slave states and free states, with eleven each. [5][6] The Missouri question in the 15th Congress ended in stalemate on March 4, 1819, the House sustaining its northern antislavery position and the Senate blocking a slavery restricted statehood. Whatever the merits of the institution—and Southerners violently disagreed about this, never more so than in the 1820s—the presence of the slave was a fact too critical, too sensitive, too perilous to be dealt with by those not directly affected. [59], The South, voting as a bloc on measures that challenged slaveholding interests and augmented by defections from free states with southern sympathies, was able to tally majorities. All 163 seats in the Missouri House of Representatives were up for election in 2020. ", Wilentz, 2004. p. 379: "When the territorial residents of Missouri applied for admission to the Union, most Southerners—and, probably, at first, most Northerners—assumed slavery would be allowed. It also recommended having no restrictions on slavery but keeping the Thomas Amendment. a common southern view [held] that the best way to ameliorate the lot of the slave and [achieving] emancipation, was by distributing slavery throughout the Union. [17], In 1812, Louisiana, a major cotton producer and the first to be carved from the Louisiana Purchase, had entered the Union as a slave state. With that understanding, slaveholders had co-operated in authorizing the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 and outlawing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Missouri is a state in the United States. In 1804, Congress limited the further introduction of enslaved men and women to those introduced by actual settlers. The moral dimensions of the expansion of human bondage would be raised by northern Republicans on constitutional grounds. [36], Five Representatives in Maine were opposed to spreading slavery into new territories. ", Brown, 1966, p. 22: "The insistence (FILL)... outside the South" p. 23: The amalgamated Republicans, "as a party of the whole nation... ceased to be responsive to any particular elements in its constituency. [92], The Senate decided to connect the two measures. ", Wilentz, 2016. pp. ", Wilentz, 2004. pp. ", Howe, 2004. p. 147: "Tallmadge was an independent-minded Republican, allied at the time with Dewitt Clinton's faction in New York state politics. 454–455: "Although there is nothing to suggest that the political aspirations of the Federalists were responsible for the move to restrict slavery in Missouri, once the controversy erupted for Federalists were not unwilling to consider the possibility of a new political alignment. Northern attacks on the institution were regarded as incitements to riot among the slave populations—deemed a dire threat to white southern security. The South, with its smaller free population than the North, benefited from that arrangement. ", Wilentz, 2004. p. 376: "Jeffersonian rupture over slavery drew upon ideas from the Revolutionary era. Earlier and more passionately than the Federalists, Republicans rooted their antislavery arguments, not in political expediency, but in egalitarian morality—the belief, as Fuller declared, that it was both 'the right and duty of Congress' to restrict the spread 'of the intolerable evil and the crying enormity of slavery.' It passed a bill for the admission of Maine with an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to form a state constitution. [96], The disputes involved the competition between the southern and northern states for power in Congress and control over future territories. 114–115: "The political and sectional problem originally raised by the Tallmadge amendment, the problem of the control of the Mississippi Valley, quite failed to conceal [the] profound renumciation of human rights. That would require halting the spread of slavery westward and confine the institution to where it already existed. The allegations by Southern interests for slavery of a "plot" or that of "consolidation" as a threat to the Union misapprehended the forces at work in the Missouri crisis. Dangerfleld, 1965. p. 111: "The most prominent feature of the voting at this stage was its apparently sectional character. Genevieve. ", Ellis, 1995. p. 266: "the idea of prohibiting the extension of slavery into the western territories could more readily be seen as a fulfillment rather than a repudiation of the American Revolution, indeed as the fulfillment of Jefferson's early vision of an expansive republic populated by independent farmers unburdened by the one legacy that defied the principles of 1776 [slavery]. [93] The House then approved the whole bill 134–42 with opposition from the southern states.[93]. [43], Southern states, after the American Revolutionary War, had regarded slavery as an institution in decline except for Georgia and South Carolina. In an April 22 letter to John Holmes, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the division of the country created by the Compromise Line would eventually lead to the destruction of the Union:[97], ...but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. The House then approved the Senate compromise amendment, 90–87, with all of the opposition coming from representatives from the free states. p. 10: "Federalists had vanished" from national politics. Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, in a desperate bid to break the deadlock, divided the Senate bills. The struggle was revived over a clause in Missouri's new constitution, written in 1820, which required the exclusion of "free negroes and mulattoes" from the state. ", Parsons, 2009, p. 56: "Animosity between Federalists and Republicans had been replaced by animosity between Republicans themselves, often over the same issues that had once separated them from the Federalists. Missouri has two senators in the United States Senate and eight representatives in the United States House of Representatives. In addition, in appointing the officials from the Indiana Territory to Upper Louisiana (as Missouri was known until 1812), Congress heightened concerns that it intended to extend some sort of prohibition on slavery's growth across the river. p. 4: "The Republicans had taken over (as they saw it) that which was of permanent value in the Federal program." ", Brown, 1966. p. 22: "The insistence that slavery was uniquely a Southern concern, not to be touched by outsiders, had been from the outset a sine qua non for Southern participation in national politics. The free inhabitants of Missouri in the territorial phase or during statehood, had the right to establish or disestablish slavery without interference from the federal government. Slavery must remain a Southern question. The balance of power between the sections and the maintenance of Southern pre-eminence on matters related to slavery resided in the Senate. Because it had competition, it could maintain discipline. That sum was used for each state to calculate congressional districts and the number of delegates to the Electoral College. As the Constitution, in Article 4, section 4, made a republican government in the states a fundamental guarantee of the Union, the extension of slavery into areas where slavery did not exist in 1787 was not only immoral but unconstitutional. There was no basis, however, for the charge that Federalists had directed Tallmadge in his antislavery measures, and there was nothing to indicate that a New York-based King-Clinton alliance sought to erect an antislavery party on the ruins of the Republican Party. As the Louisiana Territory was not part of the United States in 1787, they argued that introducing slavery into Missouri would thwart the egalitarian intent of the Founders. Copies of certified Death Records cost $13 per record and $10 for every additional copy ordered at the same time. In their defense, they wrote that, if the North, and the nation, embarked upon this Compromise—and ignored what experiences proved, namely that southern slave holders were determined to dominate the nation through ironclad unity and perpetual pressure to demand more land, and more slaves—then these five Mainers declared Americans "shall deserve to be considered a besotted and stupid race, fit, only, to be led blindfold; and worthy, only, to be treated with sovereign contempt". ", Malone, 1969. p. 419: "After 1815, settlers had poured across the Mississippi.... Several thousand planters took their slaves in the area....", Howe, 2004, p. 147: "By 1819, enough settlers had crossed the Mississippi River that Missouri Territory could meet the usual population criterion for admission to the Union." Federalist 'plots' and 'consolidation'], Monroe and other Southerners obscured the very real weight of antislavery sentiment involved in the restrictionist movement. Individual rights, the Republicans asserted, has been defined by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—'an authority admitted in all parts of the Union [as] a definition of the basis of republican government.' Representative John W. Taylor pointed to Indiana and Illinois, where their free state status conformed to antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance. ", Wilentz, 2004 p. 376: "When fully understood, however, the story of sectional divisions among the Jeffersonians recovers the Jeffersonian antislavery legacy, exposes the fragility of the 'second party system' of the 1830s and 1840s, and vindicates Lincoln's claims about his party's Jeffersonian origins. Before the bill was returned to the House, a second amendment was adopted, on the motion of Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, to exclude slavery from the Louisiana Territory north of 36°30 north, the southern boundary of Missouri, except within the limits of the proposed state of Missouri. Antislavery elements in the South vacillated, as did their hopes for the imminent demise of human bondage. As the party of the whole nation, it ceased to be responsive to any particular elements in its constituency. The Missouri State Congressional Term Limits Amendment, also known as Amendment 12, was on the November 3, 1992 ballot in Missouri as an initiated constitutional amendment, where it was approved. [62][63], The Tallmadge Amendment was "the first serious challenge to the extension of slavery" and raised questions concerning the interpretation of the republic's founding documents. ", Wilentz, 2004. p. 378: "A Poughkeepsie lawyer and former secretary to Governor George Clinton, Tallmadge had served in Congress for just over two years when he made his brief but momentous appearance in national politics. ", Wilentz, 2004 p. 380 (Table 1 adapted from Wilentz), Ammons, 1971. p. 454: "[President Monroe] and other Republicans were convinced that behind the attempt to exclude slavery from Missouri was a carefully concealed plot to revive the party divisions of the past either openly as Federalism or some new disguise. The 2021 legislative session marks the beginning of the 101st General Assembly. [105], Era of Good Feelings and party "amalgamation", Louisiana Purchase and Missouri Territory, Brown, 1966. p. 25: "[Henry Clay], who managed to bring up the separate parts of the compromise separately in the House, enabling the Old Republicans [in the South] to provide him with a margin of victory on the closely contested Missouri [statehood] bill while saved their pride by voting against the Thomas Proviso.". ", Varon, 2008. p. 39: "they were openly resentful of the fact that the three-fifths clause had translated into political supremacy for the South. They had no agenda to remove it from the Constitution but only to prevent its further application west of the Mississippi River. It ceased to be responsive to the South." Centered on red, white and blue fields is the Missouri state seal. [1] The 16th United States Congress passed the legislation on March 3, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March 6, 1820. [26], A political outsider, the 41-year-old Tallmadge conceived his amendment based on a personal aversion to slavery. Because the number of presidential electors assigned to each state was equal to the size of its congressional delegation... the South had power over the election of presidents that was disproportionate to the size of the region's free population... since Jefferson's accession in 1801, a 'Virginia Dynasty' had ruled the White House. Jeffersonians. That the unmentionable subject had been raised publicly was deeply offensive to southern representatives and violated the long-time sectional understanding between legislators from free states and slave states. And "The insistence that slavery was uniquely a Southern concern, not to be touched by outsiders, had been from the outset a sine qua non for Southern participation in national politics. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. Out of the total population of 67,000, slaves represented about 15%. The additional political representation allotted to the South as a result of the Three-Fifths Compromise gave southerners more seats in the House of Representatives than they would have had if the number was based on the free population alone. Slavery's revival weakened what had been, during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era, a widespread assumption in the South, although not in South Carolina and Georgia, that slavery was doomed. [70], Missouri statehood confronted southern Jeffersonians with the prospect of applying the egalitarian principles espoused by the Revolutionary generation. Between 1815 and 1820, U.S. cotton production doubled, and, between 1820 and 1825, it doubled again. Yet even with the extra seats, the share held by major slaveholding states actually declined between 1790 to 1820, from 45% to 42%... [and] none of the bills listed in the study concerned slavery, whereas in 1819, antislavery Northerners, most of them Jeffersonian Republicans, rallied a clear House majority to halt slavery's expansion. Jefferson, at first unperturbed by the Missouri question, soon became convinced that a northern conspiracy was afoot, with Federalists and crypto-Federalists posing as Republicans and using Missouri statehood as a pretext. The Missouri House of Representatives was one of 86 state legislative chambers holding elections in 2020. [42] The Founders sanctioned slavery but did so with the implicit understanding that the slave states would take steps to relinquish the institution as opportunities arose. [69], The 15th Congress had debates that focused on constitutional questions but largely avoided the moral dimensions raised by the topic of slavery. [2], Earlier, in February 1819, Representative James Tallmadge Jr., a Jeffersonian Republican from New York, had submitted two amendments to Missouri's request for statehood that included restrictions on slavery. "[Northern] Republicans rooted their antislavery arguments, not on expediency, but in egalitarian morality. If a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! In the 1790s, with the introduction of the cotton gin, to 1815, with the vast increase in demand for cotton internationally, slave-based agriculture underwent an immense revival that spread the institution westward to the Mississippi River. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903, is the one responsible for bestowing the nickname. [68], As a legal precedent, they offered the treaty acquiring the Louisiana lands in 1803, a document that included a provision, Article 3, which extended the rights of US citizens to all inhabitants of the new territory, including the protection of property in slaves. ), 21st, Land: 68,898 sq.mi. The Jeffersonian rupture over slavery drew upon ideas from the Revolutionary era. Since 1815, sectional parity in the Senate had been achieved through paired admissions, which left the North and the South, during the application of Missouri Territory, at 11 states each.