The Missouri Compromise Of 1820: Slavery In The Louisiana Purchase

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Purchase. There was a balance within the United States of the states allowed to have slavery. This balance continued as a battle raged for thirty years over the issue of slavery. This slave issue, however, was not addressed by Congress.

Freedom for whites coexisted with bondage for African Americans. When the Union at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 drafted the U.S. Constitution it recognized the right of a state to regulate slavery. Without that right of their sovereign power over slavery, the slave states would never have joined the Union. Thus, white liberty and black slavery were constitutionally joined in the very creation of the Federal Union.

Within a generation

of the Revolution, the North was moving away from slavery. The North was growing and evolving at a more rapid pace than the South. A northern majority viewed slavery as a moral wrong that should be eliminated. Since slavery within the states was protected by the Constitution, antislavery sentiment focused on keeping it out of the territories.

The southerners argued that the territories were the common property of all the states and therefore they insisted on what they felt was their constitutional right to carry slaves into new territories with them.

The result was a decade of sectional strife.

In 1850 a Compromise was passed that admitted California as a free state, but still failed to address the issue of slavery for the entire United States. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed the people of a territory to decide whether or not to allow slavery. In 1857, the Dred Scott Ruling denied citizenship rights to slaves because they were considered property. A man named John Brown wanted slavery abolished and felt that arming slaves would allow them to fight for freedom. His effort ended in his death by hanging.

Vowing to use federal power both to keep slavery in check and to promote the free labor economy of the North through protective tariffs, subsidies for railroad, and free homesteads in the

West.

The Republicans supported Abraham Lincoln for the presidency in 1860. His victory over three rivals – Stephen Douglas for the Northern Democrats, John C. Breckinridge for the Southern Democrats, and John Bell, the candidate of former Whigs in the Upper South – was achieved with no support in the South. The South did not want Republican rule so Southern radicals immediately began organizing a campaign for secession. Pushing the constitutional doctrine of states' rights to the extreme, the secessionists held that individual states retained ultimate sovereignty within the Union and could peacefully leave the Union the same way they had entered it through special state conventions. South Carolina took the lead and within six weeks seven states from the Lower South left the Union. Delegates from these states set up the provisional government of the Confederate States of America at Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861.

Northerners rejected the doctrine of secession.

Believing that the Union was sovereign and perpetual, they viewed secession as an illegal and a revolutionary act. They feared that it would lead quickly to a fragmentation of the United States and put an end to America's mission of serving as a beacon of free government to the rest of the world. Still, no consensus existed on using force to get the seceded states back into the Union. In particular, Democrats were against it and favored negotiations to heal the sectional rift, even with the continuation of slavery. At the same time, the Unionists in the Upper South who had turned back secession in their slave states proclaiming that they would resist any Republican use of military force against a seceded

state.
When inaugurated Lincoln thus faced a dilemma. If he took no action against the Confederacy, he risked demoralizing his party and subjecting his administration to the same derision that had pilloried the outgoing Buchanan Democrats for standing by while the secessionists broke up the Union. On the other hand, any forceful step against the seceded states threatened to divide the North and drive the Upper South into the Confederacy. They were states with the most slaves and the highest percentage of white families owning slaves.

In the predawn hours of April 12, 1861, Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter. The next day, Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 state militia. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina rejected Lincoln's call for troops and joined the Confederacy. Still, Lincoln had a Northern majority behind the goal of preserving the Union with force. The Confederacy was cast as the aggressor that had fired the first shot of the Civil War, and the Northern crusade to save the Union persisted through four years of war.