The Missouri Compromise Of 1820: Slavery In The Louisiana Purchase

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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 …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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

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