Quotes About Missouri Compromise

I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

It has been sometimes contended that, because the Congress of the Confederation, by the Ordinance of 1787, prohibited involuntary servitude in all the Northwestern Territory, the framers of the Constitution must have recognized such power to exist in the Congress of the United States. Hence the deduction that the prohibitory clause of what is known as the Missouri Compromise was justified by the precedent of the Ordinance of 1787.

spring. The enormous economic impact of the mule trade and how Oregon Trail traffic stimulated the American economy have been frequently ignored by historians, mostly because it is a lot more prestigious for professional academics to sound learned about Senator Thomas Hart Benton or the Missouri Compromise than to actually know something about America's basic means of transportation for a century—wagons and mules. Yes,

But this momentous question [the Missouri Compromise], like a firebell in the night awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it the knell of the Union.

Recall that the 1789 law prohibited slavery in a federal territory. In 1820, the Democratic Congress passed the Missouri Compromise 40 and reversed that earlier policy, permitting slavery in almost half of the federal territories. Several States were subsequently admitted as slave States; and for the first time since the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, slavery was being officially promoted by congressional policy.