15 Facts About Missouri Compromise

Missouri Compromise was United States federal legislation that balanced desires of northern states to prevent expansion of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it.

When free-soil Maine offered its petition for statehood, the Senate quickly linked the Maine and Missouri Compromise bills, making Maine admission a condition for Missouri Compromise entering the Union as a slave state.

Missouri Compromise was very controversial, and many worried that the country had become lawfully divided along sectional lines.

Missouri Compromise had played a leading role in accelerating the emancipation of the remaining slaves in New York in 1817 and had campaigned against Illinois's Black Codes.

The sectional "rupture" over slavery among Jeffersonian Republicans, first exposed in the Missouri Compromise Crisis, had its roots in the Revolutionary generation.

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Missouri Compromise crisis marked a rupture in the Republican Ascendency, the national association of Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans that had dominated federal politics since the War of 1812.

Missouri Compromise statehood confronted southern Jeffersonians with the prospect of applying the egalitarian principles espoused by the Revolutionary generation.

Missouri Compromise debates stirred suspicions by slavery interests that the underlying purpose of the Tallmadge Amendments had little to do with opposition to the expansion of slavery.

Missouri Compromise suggested that Senator Rufus King's "warm" support for the Tallmadge Amendment concealed a conspiracy to organize a new antislavery party in the North, which would be composed of old Federalists in combination with disaffected antislavery Republicans.

The additional political representation allotted to the South as a result of the Three-Fifths Missouri 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.

James Tallmadge of New York offered the Tallmadge Amendment, which forbade further introduction of slaves into Missouri Compromise and mandated that all children of slave parents born in the state after its admission to be free at the age of 25.

Debate over the admission of Missouri Compromise raised the issue of sectional balance, as the country was equally divided between slave states and free states, with eleven each.

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.

Provisions of the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30' north were effectively repealed by Stephen A Douglas's Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise caused outrage in the North and sparked the return to politics of Abraham Lincoln, who criticized slavery and excoriated Douglas's act in his "Peoria Speech" .