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Chapter 16 the south and slavery controversy
The debate over slavery
The debate over slavery
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Recommended: Chapter 16 the south and slavery controversy
Missouri Compromise In 1819, the territory of Missouri applied for statehood. It was the first new state to be taken from the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. The issue of Missouri attempting to become a state sparked much debate and controversy. The debate in Congress was mainly about sectional power and not whether slavery was right or wrong. The people from the North disagreed with the added representation in Congress and in the Electoral College. Since Missouri would be a slave state, they would be able to count three-fifths of their slave population towards representation. The three-fifths rule had already added significant power to the South. In 1790, the South controlled 47 percent of Congress while only having 40 percent of the white population. The crisis brought the commitment of slavery and the resentment of Southern political power to a heated collision. The North vowed to give up no more land to slavery, while the South began talks of dissolving the union and civil war. One man, James Tallmadge Jr., a congressman from New York, proposed amendments to the bill attempting to allow Missouri to become a state. One proposed the ban of additional slaves to be brought into Missouri. This would not allow Missouri to gain more representation by simply increasing their number of slaves. Also, the amendments would emancipate Missouri slaves born after its admission as a state when they reached an age of 25. This again would limit Missouri's slave population. The voting on the Tallmadge amendments was again largely sectional. The North had held a large majority in the House of Representatives and the South had a small majority in the Senate. The House accepted the amendments but the southern senators with help from a few others defeated them in the Senate. After being deadlocked in Congress, the Missouri Compromise was finally passed by a new Congress in 1820. As part of the compromise, Massachusetts had offered its northern most counties to become the new free state of Maine. The addition of two new states kept the balance between free and slave states. This settled the fears of the South gaining votes in the House or Senate. Along with this there was the Thomas Proviso which would admit Missouri as a state on the condition that the South would agree to outlaw slavery above a line from the Spanish Territory to the southern border of Missouri.
This was a good idea by the Governor but in all reality, it would never be successful at this point in time. The Emigrand Aid Society sent 20,000 men to try and override the election while the South Band sent 5,000 people across the Missouri armed and dangerous. The men were ready, “to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory.” These men did their jobs
70. The provisions of the Missouri Compromise are: Maine came in as a free state.
...ri Compromise allowed different states to be a part of the Union while preserving their socio-economic base. These two divergent views were not sustainable within a union. Jefferson’s statement “[t]his momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror” was accurate, in that it foreshadowed the disunion of the states. Allowing Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, and others to enter as free states were in fact catalysts for major conflict between Americans who believed in the abolition of slavery. The Missouri Compromise also signaled the occurrence of the nullification doctrine due to conflicts arising from various factions within the Union. The nullification doctrine which allowed states to determine which federal law to abide by defeated the purpose of having a union.
Most Americans would claim a cop killer should be put to death which is what Scott D Cheever will face if he loses in the Supreme Court of the United States. Scott D Cheever and the state of Kansas argued before Supreme Court of the United States on October 16, 2013. The question posed before the court was when a criminal defendant affirmatively introduces expert testimony that he lacked the requisite mental state to commit capital murder of a law enforcement officer due to the alleged temporary and long-term effects of the defendant’s methamphetamine use, does the state violate the defendant’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination by rebutting the defendant’s mental state defense with evidence from a court-ordered mental evaluation of the defendant? The answer is no, the United States Supreme Court should reverse the decision of the Kansas Supreme Court because his fifth amendment’s rights were not violated.
Thomas Jefferson, in response to the Missouri Compromise, expressed, “ I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence… and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper” (Meacham 475). Jefferson explained how the Missouri Compromise led to the sectionalism between the North and South, which caused the Civil War. Western expansion and the Louisiana Purchase both led to the formation of the Missouri Compromise as more states started applying for statehood, which disrupted the balance between the slave and free states. Additionally, the division between the North and South increased rapidly because of the Missouri Compromise. It created a line that
In 1819, Missouri wanted to join the Union, although in the North, as a slave state. In would make the balance of power in the Congress unequal.
Crisis struck in 1820, when the North/South balance in the Senate was threatened by the application of Missouri to join the Union as a slave state. Southerners, aware of their numerical inferiority in the House of Representatives, were keen to maintain their political sway, in the Senate. The North feared that if Southerners were to take control of the Senate, political deadlock would ensue. Compromise was found in 1820 when Maine applied to join as a free state, maintaining the balance.
Additionally, the majority of states had conflicts between slavery in their territory, one of them dealt with missouri. Missouri applied for admission into the Union as a slave state; this became a problem because missouri ruined the balance for free slaves and slave states. The northern states wanted to ban slavery from occurring in missouri because the unbalanced situation it put towards the other states. In response, the southern states declared how congress doesn’t have the power to ban slavery in missouri. However, Henry Clay offers a solution, the missouri compromise of 1820. Missouri admitted as slave state and Maine becomes a free slave state. Slavery is banned in Louisiana creating a 36 30 line in missouri’s southern border; this maintained the balance in the U.S senate.
In 1820 Missouri wanted to join the Union as a slave state. As this would ruin the balance between Slave states and Free states in the Senate, Henry Clay proposed the Missouri compromise. This arranged it that while Missouri was admitted as a Slave state, Maine was also admitted as a free state. It also created an imaginary line along the 36o latitude, where slavery was allowed below it but prevented above it. However they limited themselves by only applying the Compromise to lands gained in the Louisiana purchase. This led to conflict after the Mexican war in which America gained new territories in the West. This doomed the Missouri Compromise, which was probably the most promising of the three. Had the Compromise been applied to all American lands then perhaps it could have succeeded. Instead the Missouri Compromise failed and only led to further conflict between north and south in the future.
In 1817, the Missouri Territory Assembly applied for statehood. Missouri was slated to be the first state, other than Louisiana, to be created from the purchase. Considering there were slaves already in Missouri territory, it was clear that Missouri was going to enter the Union as a slave state and have implications on the rest of the new territory from the Louisiana Purchase unless Congress opposed it (America Past and Present). Fear began to rise due to the unbalance of free and slave states. Fortunately, the Maine territory was separated from Massachusetts and requested statehood.
The collapse of the second party system signified a removal of a whole structure that resembled the past. The arrival of the Republican Party as an opponent to the Democratic Party supposed slavery the next major matter for political debate. In 1858, the Republicans controlled almost all the Northern states, which meant that the possibility of “no more slave states” (226) was plausible. The Southerners did not think it was possible for the Republicans to end slavery because of the Dred Scott decision. Dred Scott ineffectively sued for his and his family’s freedom. The rejection of Scott’s case in the Missouri Supreme court led to the Dred Scott decision, which prohibited blacks whose ancestors imported to the United States to become American Citizens. The decision, also, brought about the Missouri Compromise of 1820; the compromise prohibited slavery in certain areas. Politicians failed to convey their viewpoint on the subject of slavery, which eventually led to Lincoln’s success in the presidential election of 1860. After Lincoln took power, nearly all slave states were no longer slave states, and it all resulted in the outbreak of a civil
A controversial issue during 1860 to 1877 was state’s rights and federal power. The North and South were divided over this issue. The North composed of free states and an industrial economy while the South was made up of slave states and an agricultural economy. The South did not like federal authority over the issue of slavery; therefore, they supported the radical state rights’ ideology. South Carolina seceded from the Union because it believed that since states made up the Union, it could leave when it chooses to. The government argued against the South saying that they had no right to leave the Union because the Union was not made up of just states but people. However, the South counteracted this argument with the case that the 10th amendment “declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by its states, were reserved to the states.” (Doc A) However, the government still believed that secession from the Union was unjust and decided that a new change surrounding state’s rights was necessary. As a result, when the Union won in the Civil War, a resolution was made, where the state’s lost their power and the federal government gained power. U...
Furthermore, the creation of The Constitution caused much debate between the elite and democratic states because they thought that if the Government got all of the power, they would lose their rights. The conflict between the North and South played a major role in the development of this document. The North felt that representation in Congress should be based on the number of total people and South felt that it should be based on number of whites. However, The Three Fifths Compromise settled this when it was said a slave will count as 3/5 of a free person of representatives and taxation. Article one section two of the Constitution defines how the population will be counted, obviously there was a strong opposition to this by Southern states like Virginia because their economy was based on slave labor and they had a bigger population because of it.
Congress was put in a tough position when Missouri applied for statehood, for they couldn’t have an uneven number of states. If they didn’t have an even number, they would have to come up with another idea to make slave states and free states equal, such as adding a state or neutralizing an existing slave state. Instead of making one of the existing twenty-two states neutral to slavery they accepted Maine as free state. The acceptance of Maine as it’s own state did not occur until 1820, but the addition of it did even the amount of slave states and free states to twelve and twelve. The Missouri Compromise did not only ban slavery from Maine and allow s...
As the country began to grow and expand we continued to see disagreements between the North and South; the Missouri Territory applied for statehood the South wanted them admitted as a slave state and the North as a free state. Henry Clay eventually came up with the Missouri Compromise, making Missouri a slave state and making Maine it’s own state entering the union as a free state. After this compromise any state admitted to the union south of the 36° 30’ latitude would be a slave state and a state north of it would be free. The country was very much sectionalized during this time. Thomas Jefferson felt this was a threat to the Union. In 1821, he wrote, ”All, I fear, do not see the speck on our horizon which is to burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later. The line of division lately marked out between the different portions of our confederacy is such...