Part 27 (1/2)
[Sidenote: Missouri bill.]
[Sidenote: Maine bill.]
[Sidenote: Compromise line.]
During 1819 the question was discussed throughout the Union. Several legislatures, by unanimous votes, protested against admitting a new Slave State, and when the new Congress a.s.sembled in 1819 it became the princ.i.p.al issue of the session. Alabama was at once admitted, restoring the balance of Slave and Free States. The people of Maine were now about to separate from Ma.s.sachusetts, and also pet.i.tioned for entrance into the Union. A bill for this purpose pa.s.sed the House on December 30, and a month later a bill for the admission of Missouri, with the Talmadge amendment, was also introduced into the House. The Senate, on Feb. 16, 1820, voted to admit Maine, provided Missouri was at the same time admitted as a Slave State.
The House still refused to comply. Thomas of Illinois now proposed as a compromise the principle suggested by McLane a year earlier,--that an east and west line be drawn across the Louisiana cession, north of which slavery should be prohibited. Fourteen Northern members united with the seventy-six Southern members to form a bare majority against prohibiting slavery in Missouri; the principle was thus abandoned, and the only question was where the line should be drawn: the parallel of 36 30' was selected, but it was expressly provided that Missouri should be slaveholding. On March 3 the compromise became a law.
[Sidenote: Missouri const.i.tution.]
A year later a third difficulty arose. The people of Missouri had formed a const.i.tution which provided that free colored men should not be allowed to enter the State under any pretext. Nearly the whole Northern vote in the House was cast against admitting the State with this provision. Clay brought about a compromise by which the Missourians were to agree not to deprive of his rights any citizen of another State. Upon this understanding Missouri was finally admitted.
[Sidenote: Friends of disunion.]
[Sidenote: Advantage to the South.]
[Sidenote: Advantage to the North.]
In form the compromises were a settlement of difficulties between the two Houses; in fact they were an agreement between the two sections, by which the future of slavery in every part of the Louisiana purchase was to be settled once for all. Threats were freely made that if slavery were prohibited in Missouri, the South would withdraw. Calhoun told Adams that if the trouble produced a dissolution of the Union, ”the South would be from necessity compelled to form an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Great Britain.” Adams retorted by asking whether, in such a case, if ”the population of the North should be cut off from its natural outlet upon the ocean, it would fall back upon its rocks bound hand and foot to starve, or whether it would not retain its powers of locomotion to move southward by land?” The compromise was, as Benton says, ”conceived and pa.s.sed as a Southern measure,” although Randolph called it a ”dirty bargain;” nevertheless, on the final test vote thirty-five Southern members refused to admit the principle that Congress could prohibit slavery in the Territories. The South gained Missouri, and a few years later Arkansas came in as a slave State; but in the long run the advantage was to the North. The South got the small end of the triangle; the North the whole region now occupied by the States of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Montana, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Minnesota; and the final struggle over slavery was postponed for thirty years.
128. RELATIONS WITH THE LATIN-AMERICAN STATES (1815-1823).
[Sidenote: The Spanish colonies.]
[Sidenote: Revolutions.]
While the attention of the country was absorbed by the Missouri struggle, a new question of diplomacy had arisen. In 1789 almost every part of the two American continents south of the United States, except Brazil, was subject to Spain. The American Revolution had given a shock to the principle of colonial government by European powers; the Spanish colonies refused to acknowledge the authority of the French usurpers in Spain, and in 1808 a series of revolts occurred. At the restoration of the Spanish Bourbons in 1814, the colonies returned to nominal allegiance. The new king attempted to introduce the old regime: the colonies had too long enjoyed the sweets of direct trade with other countries, and they resented the ungentle attempts to restore them to complete dependence; between 1816 and 1820 the provinces on the Rio de la Plata, Chile, and Venezuela again revolted; and by 1822 there was a revolutionary government in every continental Spanish province, including Mexico.
[Sidenote: The Holy Alliance.]
[Sidenote: Intervention proposed.]
When Europe was reorganized, after the fall of Napoleon, almost all the powers entered into a kind of a treaty, known as the Holy Alliance, framed Sept. 26, 1815. They announced the future principle of international relations to be that of ”doing each other reciprocal service, and of testifying by unalterable good will the mutual affection with which they ought to be animated,” and that they considered themselves ”all as members of one and the same Christian nation.” Within this pious verbiage was concealed a plan of mutual a.s.sistance in case of the outbreak of revolutions. When Spain revolted against her sovereign in 1820, a European Congress was held, and by its direction the French in 1823 a second time restored the Spanish Bourbons. The grateful king insisted that the revolution of the Spanish colonies ought to be put down by a common effort of the European powers, as a danger to the principle of hereditary government.
[Sidenote: American interests.]
[Sidenote: Russian colonization.]
[Sidenote: English proposals.]
Here the interests of the United States became involved: they were trading freely with the Spanish Americans; they sympathized with the new governments, which were nominally founded on the model of the North American republic; they felt what now seems an unreasonable fear that European powers would invade the United States. At the same time the Russians, who had obtained a foothold on the northwest coast fifty years earlier, were attempting to establish a permanent colony, and on Sept. 24, 1821, issued a ukase forbidding all foreigners to trade on the Pacific coast north of the fifty-first parallel, or to approach within one hundred Italian miles of the sh.o.r.e. John Quincy Adams, who had a quick eye for national rights, protested vigorously. Now came most gratifying evidence that the United States was the leading power in America: in September, 1823, the British government proposed to our minister in England that the two countries should unite in a declaration against European intervention in the colonies. The invitation was declined, but the good will of Great Britain was a.s.sured.
129. THE MONROE DOCTRINE (1823).
[Sidenote: Monroe's message.]
[Sidenote: Colonization clause.]
[Sidenote: Intervention Clause.]
John Quincy Adams had succeeded in bringing the President to the point where he was willing, in behalf of the nation, to make a protest against both these forms of interference in American affairs. When Congress met, in December, 1823, Monroe sent in a message embodying what is popularly called the Monroe Doctrine. He had taken the advice of Jefferson, who declared that one of the maxims of American policy was ”never to suffer Europe to meddle with cis-Atlantic affairs.” Madison, with characteristic caution, suggested an agreement with Great Britain to unite in ”armed disapprobation.” In the cabinet meeting, Adams pointed out that intervention would result, not in restoring the colonies to Spain, but in dividing them among European nations, in which case Russia might take California. His views prevailed, and the message contained, in the first place, a clause directed against Russia: ”The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have a.s.sumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” Against intervention there was even a stronger protest: ”With the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it,... we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”