Definition
In early 1819, Missouri asked to join the Union as a slave state, with about ten thousand enslaved people already living there. On February 13, 1819, Representative James Tallmadge Jr. of New York amended the Missouri statehood bill to ban bringing more enslaved people into the state and to free, at age twenty-five, children later born there to enslaved parents. The House passed the amendment, North against South, but the Senate killed it, and Missouri's admission stalled. Southerners said Congress could not set terms for a new state and called restriction a first step.
Why it matters on the AP exam
The amendment started the Missouri crisis, a national fight over whether slavery could spread into new states. It showed that slavery divided Congress by region even though one party, the Republicans, held power in the Era of Good Feelings. The deadlock ended with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and barred slavery north of 36°30′ in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. Questions use the crisis to test causation and sectionalism after the War of 1812, and Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Missouri question woke him "like a fire bell in the night."
In the sources
“If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!”
Connections
- Missouri Compromise: the 1820 deal that ended the deadlock the amendment began
- Northwest Ordinance: the 1787 law that earlier barred slavery in a territory north of the Ohio
- Three-Fifths Compromise: its count of enslaved people shaped each section's strength in the House