Crittenden Compromise

On December 18, 1860 Kentucky Senator John Crittenden, offered the Crittenden Compromise as a last ditch effort to end the Civil War. It, like many other compromises before it, tried to make a compromise between the North and the South about which United States territories should and should not have slavery. The Compromise of 1850, and the Missouri Compromise were two previous compromises that had been passed that dealt with slavery in the United States.

The Crittenden Compromise proposed that the United States take the boundary between the slave states and free states that was set by the Missouri Compromise, and basically extended the line to California. The states below the line would be classified as slave states, and those above the line were classified as free states. The compromise also supported slavery in the District of Columbia, and asked for a great deal of suppression of African slave trade. It also stated that Congress would have no power to abolish slavery in states that permitted slave holding, and could not prohibit the transportation of slaves from one slave holding state to another. The Crittenden Compromise failed in the House of Representatives in January of 1861 by a vote of 113 to 80, and then failed in the Senate in March of 1861 by a vote of 20 to 19.

The Missouri Compromise was passed by the United States Congress to end the first of many problems they were faced with, concerning the extension of slavery in new United States territories.

In 1819, Alabama was admitted to the United States as a slave state, which made the number of representatives in the United States Senate for free states and slave states equal. Then, in 1820, both Missouri and Maine wanted to be admitted to the United States and there was a debate as to if either of the states would be slave states. Maine was admitted as a free state, and Missouri was admitted as a state without restrictions on slavery. Instead of Missouri being a free state, it was decided that all the land in the Louisiana Purchase that was north of 36°30’N latitude, slavery would be prohibited. This provision was held until 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed it.

Part of the Crittenden Compromise stemmed directly from the Missouri Compromise. The line created in the Missouri Compromise was the lin...

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...people were becoming upset about. The Free-Soilers would not have been affected by this decision, because supposedly they had all of their slavery issues solved with the Compromise of 1850, which was eleven years before this. In the Know-Nothings, the Southerners had seized control of the group and ordered for maintenance of slavery in it. Had this proposal been adopted, there would have been more equal numbers of Northerners and Southerners in the group. Therefore, this proposal would have made everyone happy, because the deal is not unfair to one group.

Often times wars are started over conflicts that could have been solved peacefully, had someone sat down and logically came up with a proposal that was fair to those on both sides of the conflict. Often times throughout American history, the South was given deals that were unfair to them, and this cause a lot of dissention among them. Had fair deals been given to both the North and the South, the Civil War might not have occurred, but whether that is true or not will never be known. Hopefully the United States government has learned what can happen as a result of proposing deals that are unfair to one side of the opposing groups.