It was a dark time in the history of the United States. A crisis was shadowing the country and had locked the North and the South at each other’s throats. Tensions were escalating and civil war seemed imminent. One brave man stood up to the challenge of resolving the conflict – Congressman Henry Clay of Kentucky. Despite his old age and illness, he managed to develop a set of compromise measures and convinced both sides to agree to it. This compromise, the Compromise of 1850, may have held off the Civil War for a decade, giving the North ample time to prepare (Remini). But, it wasn’t the only compromise Clay played a part in. Clay is well-known for developing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise Tariff of 1833, as well as the aforementioned Compromise of 1850. These compromises earned Clay the name of the “Great Compromiser” (Van Deusen), and saved the Union from falling into discord.
Henry Clay’s first major compromise was the Missouri Compromise of 1820, created after a huge debate regarding slavery that threatened to tear the Union apart. The dispute started in 1817, when Missouri applied for statehood. Congress decided to make a law to allow Missouri to frame a state constitution in 1819, and Representative James Tallmadge of New York wanted to add an antislavery amendment to the law to stop further introduction of slaves to the state and to free slaves already there at the age of twenty-five. This caused a huge uproar about the national government’s right to restrict slavery, resulting in Tallmadge’s bill passing in the House but failing in the Senate. When Congress received a request from Maine for statehood in December 1819, the Senate took the chance for compromise. It passed a bill to admit Maine as a free s...
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Rush, Thomas. "Henry Clay (1777-1852)." American History from Revolution to Reconstruction. GMW, n.d. Web. 9 Mar. 2014. .
"The Tariff of Abominations." History, Art & Archives, United States House of Representatives. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014. .
"Tariff of 1832 and Clay's Compromise." Hippocampus. Regents of the University of California and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, 2006. Web. 11 Mar. 2014. .
Van Deusen, Glyndon G. "Henry Clay." Britannica School. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2014. Web. 9 Mar. 2014. .
Parsons, L. H. (2009). The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
In The article “Slavery, the Constitutional, and the Origins of the Civil War”, Paul Finkelman discusses some of the events that he believes lead the United States to have a Civil War. He discusses how both the North and the South territories of the Untied States did not see eye to eye when it came to ab...
Beard, Charles Austin. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed February 23, 2014
The Missouri Compromise acted as a balancing act among the anti-slave states and the slave states. Since states generally entered the union in pairs, it stat...
Earle, Johnathan H. Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil 1824-1854. The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Early in his life, Henry Clay came to Kentucky from Illinois and was elected to Congress. He evolved into a diplomat , negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812. Soon after he was elected into the United States House of Representatives. With the petitioned statehood of Missouri in 1820, the nation faced its first crisis over whether or not to admit a state from the Louisiana Purchase as a free state or slave state. Henry Clay diffused this crisis by crafting the Missouri Compromise. A second time, sectional strife flared up as the post-War of 1812 Tariff brought cries of "nullification and even "succession" from South Carolina in the early 1830's. After months of the rising threats of civil war, Senator Henry Clay introduced the
3. Beard, Charles A. "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States". American Politics. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston, MA. 1999. (Pages 27 -- 33).
1817 to 1825—a period of time that oversaw the presidency of the 5th U.S. president, James Monroe, whose term in office later became known as the Era of Good Feelings. The end of the War of 1812 and the "Era of Good Feelings" are often viewed as a time of cultural, economic and political nationalism; however during the era, the tension between nationalism and sectionalism began to rise. Issues about the tariff and the bank were constantly being fought over, inevitably dividing society. Not only had that split society, but the conflicts of slavery began to greatly rise, which created the problem of sectionalism, which led to Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise in 1820. Many areas had differing views on slavery and voting, which only strengthened the belief that sectionalism was taking over the smidgeon of nationalism that lingered.
Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom 1822-1832. Vol. 2. NY: Harper & Row, 1981. Print.
The turmoil between the North and South about slavery brought many issues to light. People from their respective regions would argue whether it was a moral institution and that no matter what, a decision on the topic had to be made that would bring the country to an agreement once and for all. This paper discusses the irrepressible conflict William H. Seward mentions, several politician’s different views on why they could or could not co-exist, and also discusses the possible war as a result.
After Thomas Jefferson, who served as president from 1801 to 1809, made the Louisiana Purchase on April 30, 1803, the U.S. gained 828 thousand square miles of territory from France. 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 was 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 separating from Massachusetts and requested for statehood. Correspondly, the senate passed the Missouri Compromise on February 1820, which allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and Maine enter as a free state, making the free and slave states balanced once again. Another amendment was passed to prohibit slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of the southern border of Missouri. This event envisioned a possible threat on the relationship between the North and South.
After winning the Mexican-American War in 1848, the United States gained the western territories, which included modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, as well as parts of Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. However, controversial topics, that helped cause the Civil War, arouse with the addition of these new territories. Primarily, the people of the United States wanted to know whether the new territories would be admitted as free states or slave states. In order to avoid fighting between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North, Henry Clay (Whig) and Stephen Douglas (Democrat) drafted the Compromise of 1850. Although the compromise was created to stop conflict ...
The tariff succeeds in doing its job, “...however, the resulting tax on foreign goods would raise the cost of living in the south and cuts into the profit of New England industrialists” (Excerpts taken from the History House). The South becomes furious as a result because the duties took its toll on the economy. Furthermore, the tariff was essentially pointless because cotton exports were one of the least competitive areas of trade, as the South was the leading exporters of cotton at the time. However, despite the tariff being useless, it remained and was in full effect. In fact, the government declared that “...it shall be the duty of the collector to reside at such a place, and there to detain all vessels and cargoes arriving in the said district until duties imposed…by law... be paid in cash” (Excerpts from the Library of Congress). Tensions between tax collectors and the citizens grew, and eventually, the South refused to pay the duties and attacked anyone who attempted to reinforce the duties. This leads to the beginning of the Nullification Crisis, where the South declares nullification on the Tariff of 1828, which they called the Tariff of Abominations due to the depression it brought to the
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...