Slavery In Missouri example essay topic

438 words
True or false: "Slavery was the immediate fomenting cause of the Civil War". The answer is false. Slavery was a cause of the Civil War, but not the cause. Slavery was just one of the issues that added to the unjust state rights that led to the secession of the Southern states and ultimately the American Civil War. The three major events that made the southern states feel that they were getting the short end of the bargains were: the Compromise of 1850, the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. These three documents were examples of the unfairness of the Southern state rights.

Before Missouri became a state it was believed by the southern states that it would be admitted as a slave state. To the South's surprise and dismay, Republican Representative James Talmadge of New York proposed an amendment that would prohibit the importation of slaves and ultimately bring about the emancipation of all slaves born in Missouri. The free state-slave state ratio had been equal and admitting Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state would keep it equal. The bill passed the House but failed to pass the Senate. It was rearranged to hold a clause that said instead of prohibiting slavery in Missouri, slavery was forbidden in all of the remaining land from the Louisiana Purchase. Even with this exception to Missouri, the South was enraged at the idea that they lacked the power to decide for themselves if a state was free or open to slavery.

The Missouri Compromise gave birth to feelings of resent between the North and the South. Those wounds had salt poured on them so to speak when the Compromise of 1850 was passed. The Compromise goaded the hostility between the North and the South concerning the question of the extension of slavery in all directions. The anti-slavery Republicans favored the proposal made in the Wilmot Proviso to exclude slavery form all the lands acquired from Mexico.

While the South assumed that this land was theirs for he taking and strongly opposed this plan. President Taylor favored admission of California as a free state and encouraged New Mexico to also enter as a free state. He voiced these sentiments to congress saying that in return the South should get protection from the abolitionists and that the North would "execute the fugitive slave law" (a law that all northerners despised). Henry Clay proposed a series of measures be passed to measures to admit California as a free state.