The Missouri Compromise
                     THE MISSOURI 
COMPROMISE
INTRODUCTION
The Missouri Compromise was United States 
federal legislation that balanced desires of 
northern states to prevent expansion of 
slavery in the country with those of southern 
states to expand it.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
POLICY OF PROHIBITING 
SLAVERY
It admitted Missouri as a slave state and 
Maine as a free state and declared a policy 
of prohibiting slavery in the remaining 
Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36°30′ 
parallel.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
LEGISLATION
The 16th United States Congress passed the 
legislation on March 3, 1820, and President 
James Monroe signed it on March 6, 1820.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
MISSOURI'S REQUEST 
FOR STATEHOOD
Earlier, in February 1819, Representative 
James Tallmadge Jr., a Democratic-
Republican (Jeffersonian Republican) from 
New York, had submitted two amendments 
to Missouri's request for statehood that 
included restrictions on slavery.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
ADMISSION OF MISSOURI 
AS A SLAVE STATE
Southerners objected to any bill that 
imposed federal restrictions on slavery and 
believed that it was a state issue, as settled 
by the Constitution. 
However, with the Senate evenly split at the 
opening of the debates, both sections 
possessing 11 states, the admission of 
Missouri as a slave state would give the 
South an advantage. 
Source: en.wikipedia.org
NORTHERN CRITICS
Northern critics including Federalists and 
Democratic-Republicans objected to the 
expansion of slavery into the Louisiana 
Purchase territory on the Constitutional 
inequalities of the three-fifths rule, which 
conferred Southern representation in the 
federal government derived from a state's 
slave population.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
LIMIT THE SPREAD OF 
SLAVERY
Jeffersonian Republicans in the North 
ardently maintained that a strict 
interpretation of the Constitution required 
that Congress act to limit the spread of 
slavery on egalitarian grounds.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
EGALITARIAN MORALITY
Republicans rooted their antislavery 
arguments, not on expediency, but in 
egalitarian morality.  The Constitution [said 
northern Jeffersonians], strictly interpreted, 
gave the sons of the founding generation 
the legal tools to hasten removal of slavery, 
including the refusal to admit additional 
slave states
Source: en.wikipedia.org
MAINE ADMISSION
When free-soil Maine offered its petition for 
statehood, the Senate quickly linked the 
Maine and Missouri bills, making Maine 
admission a condition for Missouri entering 
the Union as a slave state. 
Source: en.wikipedia.org
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
The Missouri Compromise was very 
controversial, and many worried that the 
country had become lawfully divided along 
sectional lines. The Kansas–Nebraska Act 
effectively repealed the bill in 1854, and the 
Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional 
in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), both of 
which increased tensions over slavery and 
contributed to the American Civil War. 
Source: en.wikipedia.org