In the following year the Missouri question came up afresh, and Senator
Thomas, of Illinois, proposed, as a compromise, that Missouri should be
admitted to the Union with slavery, but that in all the remaining
territory north of 36 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude, slavery
should be forever prohibited. This amendment was adopted in the Senate
by 24 to 20, and in the House by 90 to 87. Of the affirmative votes in
the House only fourteen were from the North, and nearly all of these
fourteen members became so unpopular at home that they lost their seats
in the next election. The Missouri Compromise was generally considered a
victory for the South, but one great Southerner considered it the
death-knell of the Union. Thomas Jefferson was still living, at the age
of seventy-seven. He saw what this sectional rift portended, and he
wrote to John Holmes, one of his correspondents, under date of April 22,
1820:
This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night,
awakened me and filled me with terror. 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. A
geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral
and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions
of men, will never be obliterated, and every new irritation
will mark it deeper and deeper.
Nearly all of the emancipationists, during the decade following the
adoption of the Compromise, were in the slaveholding states, since the
evil had its seat there. The Colonization Society's headquarters were
in Washington City. Its president, Bushrod Washington, was a Virginian,
and James Madison, Henry Clay, and John Randolph, leading Southerners,
were its active supporters. The only newspaper devoted specially to the
cause (the _Genius of Universal Emancipation_), edited by Benjamin Lundy
and William Lloyd Garrison, was published in the city of Baltimore. This
paper was started in 1829, but it was short-lived. Mr. Garrison soon
perceived that colonization, depending upon voluntary emancipation
alone, would never bring slavery to an end, since emancipation was
doubtful and sporadic, while the natural increase of slaves was certain
and vastly greater than their possible deportation. For this reason he
began to advocate emancipation without regard to colonization. This
policy was so unpopular in Maryland and Virginia that his subscription
list fell nearly to zero, and this compelled the discontinuance of the
paper and his removal to another sphere of activity. He returned to his
native state, Massachusetts, and there started another newspaper,
entitled the _Liberator_, in 1831. The first anti-slavery crusade in the
North thus had its beginning. It did not take the form of a political
party. It was an agitation, an awakening of the public conscience. Its
tocsin was immediate emancipation, as opposed to emancipation
conditioned upon deportation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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