How did the Louisiana Purchase and the Missouri Compromise shape early debates over slavery?

0:04Up until 1819, it's interesting to see how questions about slavery and the long term survival of slavery in America seemed to be surprisingly quiet. There were no major anti slavery newspapers. There was no agitation back and forth. Then suddenly in 1819, the lid blows off everything. Why? Two fundamental reasons.

0:33One of them is, and we have to crank back a few years to see this is the Louisiana Purchase. In 1803 and 1804, President Jefferson arranges brokers this extraordinary land acquisition, called the Louisiana purchase from France, from Napoleon Bonaparte. It's amazing to think about it, but basically at one swoop, Thomas Jefferson buys one third of the American West.

1:01Our borders up to that point, had been to the West, at least the Mississippi River. That was where the Treaty of Paris had staked our boundaries at the end of the American Revolution. That meant, for the most part, up until that point, the United States saw itself as a republic on the Atlantic Rim and saw its future as a Transatlantic sea going power.

1:24Study, we acquire a third of the North American Continent. That totally reorients our direction economically and in our imagination. We start thinking not facing eastwards. We start thinking facing westwards, all the way to the Pacific. Jefferson sends Lewis and Clark to explore this. All of this remains federal territory, though. Until 1819, when the first new territory to be organized out of the Louisiana purchase presents itself for territorial organization by Congress. Then eventually admission as a state of the Union, that's Missouri. That was the moment when people said, Well, now, is Missouri going to be a state that legalizes slavery or not? Is it going to be a territory? That permits the legalization of slavery or not? That's when the brawls began.

2:22It blows up in Congress when one member of Congress from New York simply lays it down as a rule. No organization of Missouri as a territory or admission as a state unless slavery is banned the same way that slavery had been banned in the old Northwest territory back in 1787. At that point, that is when all the daggers come out in Congress. The debate over it is enormous. It is so much so that Thomas Jefferson, who was then well stricken in years. But still an observer of the political scene, said that he was afraid this was going to lead to the breakup of the Union. He feared, he said it was like a fire bell in the night about what the future was likely to be. Now, what happens is that Henry Clay brokers a compromise. We will admit Missouri, but we will admit Missouri as a state that legalizes slavery.

3:19However, we will balance that by admitting the Province of Maine, which had previously been part of the state of Massachusetts. We will admit Maine as a state, a counterbalance to admitting Missouri, and what's more? We will extend the southern boundary of Missouri, 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude line. We'll extend that all the way through the rest of Louisiana purchase. Everything north of that line will have to be admitted as free territory and a free state. Everything south of that line can be, doesn't have to be, but can be admitted as slave territory and slave states. Although, if you look at a map, that 36 degrees 30 minutes line didn't provide a whole lot in the way of a future for legalized slavery. No, most of Louisiana purchase would now become destined to be free territory. But the argument over Missouri was furious, and why?

4:19Largely because people would take Missouri as a sign of where the future was going to be. Missouri would be the first piece of the Louisiana purchase to be organized, first as a territory, then admitted as a state. People believed that whatever way a decision was made about Missouri was going to be a decision for the future. Now, as it turns out, with the Missouri Compromise, the evil day of making a decision like that is put off. The compromise damps it down.

4:53The admission of Missouri is not going to be the arbiter of the future. Or at least not for right now. The Missouri Compromise satisfies people, but only for 30 some years, because eventually Southerners are going to grow very restless with the restraints that are put upon them by the Missouri Compromise. By the time we get to 1854, the sense of restlessness and resentment over those restraints is going to boil up anew.

5:24Controversy will come to the fore once again over slavery in the West. It's from there, we draw a bright line to the Civil War.