The Constitution, Race, and Renewed Relevance of Original Intent: ...

Pertinent legislation eventually was structured without any explicit provisions for or against slavery. Congress, however, prohibited slavery in the Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan territories. By the early nineteenth century, slavery had become an increasingly complicating factor in the process of establishing new territories and expanding the union. Over the next few decades, what commenced as a thorny issue hardened into an intractable problem and national crisis.

The habit of deferred reckoning and the portent of irreconcilability manifested themselves in connection with the proposal for Missouri statehood and an Arkansas territory. An initial House bill that would have banned slavery in Missouri, where it already was well established, provoked a negative southern response. Arkansas’ territorial candidacy was advanced without restrictions on slavery, and southern representatives coalesced to block Maine’s simultaneous application for admission to the union. With Maine’s statehood held hostage by the South, the House eventually approved a Senate amendment that allowed Missouri to become a state without slavery restrictions and admitted Maine as a free state. The resultant Missouri Compromise provided that slavery would be forever forbidden in the remaining Louisiana Territory north of a line etched at 36° 30’ north. The Maine and Missouri controversy, although eventually settled, disclosed that the slavery debate was ratcheting in the direction of increasing sectional rancor. Despite persisting expressions that slavery was a dying institution, as well as individual decisions by such luminaries as Jefferson, Madison, Taney, and others to liberate their slaves, the issue was enlarging rather than vanishing.

Early decades of territorial expansion reflected a general assumption that Congress possessed the power to determine slavery’s permissibility in the territories and to condition statehood accordingly. That sense originally was disclosed by the South’s endorsement of the Northwest Ordinance in antislavery terms. It persisted, despite sectional antagonisms manifested by the Missouri and Maine controversy. Evolving political thought, increasingly acrimonious debates over new territories and states, northern recognition of slavery’s actual reach, and southern perceptions of vulnerability, however, eventually destabilized initial assumptions.