U.S. Legislative Compromises Over Enslavement, 1820–1854

The Missouri Compromise, enacted in 1820, was the first real legislative attempt to resolve the question of whether enslavement should continue.

As new states entered the Union, the question of whether those states would allow the practice of enslavement (and thus come in as a "slave state") or not (as a "free state") arose. And when Missouri sought to enter the Union as a pro-slavery state, the issue suddenly became enormously controversial.

Former President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) famously likened the Missouri crisis to "a firebell in the night." Indeed, it dramatically showed there was a deep split in the Union which had been obscured up to that point. Legislatively, the country was more or less evenly divided between people who were in favor of enslavement and those who opposed it. But if that balance was not maintained, the issue of whether to continue enslaving Black Americans would need to be resolved right then, and the white people in control of the country were not ready for that.

The compromise, which was partly engineered by Henry Clay (1777–1852), maintained the status quo by continuing to balance the numbers of pro-slavery and free states, by setting an east/west line (the Mason-Dixon line) which confined slavery as an institution to the south.

It was far from a permanent solution to a profound national problem, but for three decades the Missouri Compromise seemed to keep the dilemma of whether to continue or abolish enslavement from entirely dominating the nation.

After the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), the United States gained vast tracts of territory in the West, including the present-day states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The question of whether to continue the practice of enslavement had not been at the forefront of national politics, came to great prominence once again. It became a looming national question with regard to newly acquired territories and states.

The Compromise of 1850 was a series of bills in Congress that sought to settle the issue. The compromise contained five major provisions and established California as a free state and left it up to the Utah and New Mexico to decide the issue for themselves.

It was destined to be a temporary solution. Some aspects of it, such as the Fugitive Slave Act, served to increase tensions between North and South. But it did postpone the Civil War by a decade.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was the last major compromise that sought to hold the Union together. It proved to be the most controversial: it allowed Kansas to decide whether it would come into the union as pro-slavery or free, a direct violation of the Missouri Compromise.

Engineered by Senator Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861) of Illinois, the legislation almost immediately had an incendiary effect. Instead of lessening tensions over enslavement, it inflamed them, and that led to outbreaks of violence—including the first violent actions of abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859)—that led the legendary newspaper editor Horace Greeley (1811–1872) to coin the term "Bleeding Kansas."

The Kansas-Nebraska Act also led to the bloody attack in the Senate chamber of the U.S. Capitol, and it prompted Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), who had given up on politics, to return to the political arena.

Lincoln's return to politics led to the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. And a speech he delivered at Cooper Union in New York City in February 1860 suddenly made him a serious contender for the 1860 Republican nomination.