The Missouri Question

I recently came across entries from the diary of John Quincy Adams made during the height of the 1820 crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state, the first time slavery arose as a controversial national issue, an issue that would persist and dominate domestic politics for the next forty years.  The immediate crisis was resolved by a legislative agreement to admit Missouri and Maine as states, one slave and one free, while restricting slavery in the territories of the Louisiana Purchase north of the current border of Oklahoma.  That agreement held until the aftermath of the Mexican War, with the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 which set the course for secession and Civil War.

There were two entries in particular that caught my eye, in which Adams, who served as Secretary of State under President James Monroe from 1817 to 1825, relates his conversations with John C Calhoun, Secretary of War during Monroe's two terms.  From the time of the Missouri Compromise until his death in 1850, Calhoun would be the leading political proponent of the defense of slavery, under which the peculiar institution was a positive good and an essential element in the preservation of the American Republic, while Adams became a vocal opponent of slavery.

Feb.24.—I had some conversation with Calhoun on the slave question pending in Congress. He said he did not think it would produce a dissolution of the Union, but, if it should, the South would be from necessity compelled to form an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Great Britain.

I said that would be returning to the colonial state.

He said, yes, pretty much, but it would be forced upon them. I asked him whether he thought, if by the effect of this alliance, offensive and defensive, 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. Then, he said, they would find it necessary to make their communities all military.

I pressed the conversation no further: but if the dissolution of the Union should result from the slave question, it is as obvious as anything that can be foreseen of futurity, that it must shortly afterwards be followed by the universal emancipation of the slaves. A more remote but perhaps not less certain consequence would be the extirpation of the African race on this continent, by the gradually bleaching process of intermixture, where the white portion is already so predominant, and by the destructive progress of emancipation, which, like all great religious and political reformations, is terrible in its means though happy and glorious in its end. Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union, and it is a contemplation worthy of the most exalted soul whether its total abolition is or is not practicable: if practicable, by what it may be effected, and if a choice of means be within the scope of the object, what means would accomplish it at the smallest cost of human suffering.

A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would be certainly necessary . . . [.] The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation. This object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue. 

March 3.—When I came this day to my office, I found there a note requesting me to call at one o'clock at the President's house. It was then one, and I immediately went over. He expected that the two bills, for the admission of Maine, and to enable Missouri to make a Constitution, would have been brought to him for his signature, and he had summoned all the members of the Administration to ask their opinions in writing, to be deposited in the Department of State, upon two questions: 1, Whether Congress had a Constitutional right to prohibit slavery in a Territory: and 2, Whether the eighth section of the Missouri bill (which interdicts slavery forever in the Territory north of thirty-six and a half latitude) was applicable only to the Territorial State, or could extend to it after it should become a State.

As to the first question, it was unanimously agreed that Congress have the power to prohibit slavery in the Territories . . . [.] I had no doubt of the right of Congress to interdict slavery in the Territories, and urged that the power contained in the term "dispose of" included the authority to do everything that could be done with it as mere property, and that the additional words, authorizing needful rules and regulations respecting it, must have reference to persons connected with it, or could have no meaning at all. As to the force of the term needful, I observed, it was relative, and must always be supposed to have reference to some end. Needful to what end? Needful in the Constitution of the United States to any of the ends for which that compact was formed. Those ends are declared in its preamble: to establish justice, for example. What can be more needful for the establishment of justice than the interdiction of slavery where it does not exist? . . [.]

After this meeting, I walked home with Calhoun, who said that the principles which I had avowed were just and noble: but that in the Southern country, whenever they were mentioned, they were always understood as applying only to white men. Domestic labor was confined to the blacks, and such was the prejudice, that if he, who was the most popular man in his district, were to keep a white servant in his house, his character and reputation would be irretrievably ruined.

I said that this confounding of the ideas of servitude and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery: but he thought it attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all kinds of labor—not, for example, to farming. He himself had often held the plough: so had his father. Manufacturing and mechanical labor was not degrading. It was only manual labor—the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. And it was the best guarantee to equality among the whites. It produced an unvarying level among them. It not only did not excite, but did not even admit of inequalities, by which one white man could domineer over another.

I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light. It is, in truth, all perverted sentiment—mistaking labor for slavery and dominion for freedom. The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee's manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? . . [.]

I have favored this Missouri compromise, believing it to be all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as a bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should have terminated in a convention of the States to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect, namely, that of rallying to their standard the other States by the universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break. For the present, however, this contest it laid asleep.

Their relative positions set out the stakes of the national discussion over the next forty years.  This is one of the earliest expressions of Calhoun's view that the Constitution was based on slavery and the American Republic only made possible by its existence, a view not held by southern state representatives at the Constitutional Convention, but a view that would become widely accepted in the south leading up to the Civil War.

Adams expresses his support for the compromise while wondering whether it would have been better to force the issue to a conclusion, even if it meant the dissolution of the Union.

The persistence of the slavery question and those positions can be seen in Senator Reverdy Johnson's April 5, 1864 speech in favor of the proposed 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, during the course of which he repudiated Calhoun's views:

"That distinguished statesman at that time [1847] endeavored to satisfy the Senate, having, I have no doubt, satisfied himself by his own sophistry, that republican freedom could not exist without African slavery, and proclaimed his attachment to the Union and to the Constitution upon the ground, chiefly, that the later recognized the existence of slavery."

". . . I differ with the honorable Senator from South Carolina as to the conservative influence of slavery upon our free political institutions.  I do not hold with him that they depend in any degree upon the existence of slavery.  If I did, I should value them infinitely less than I do.  In my judgment, they rest upon the virtue and intelligence of the people, and have their firmest support in the blessings which they impart."

He also, with the advantage of knowing the results of what the failure to resolve the question of slavery since 1820, ruminated that if the Founders had anticipated the current condition of the country, "they would have provided by constitutional enactment that the evil and that sin should at a comparatively unremote day be removed" and that, while the members of the Constitutional Convention, though the majority opposed slavery, made the judgment that without recognizing its current status the Union could not be formed:

"Whether this opinion was right or not, it is now useless to inquire; . . . But, if it was otherwise, if the Union could have been formed without the recognition of the institution, if its gradual extirpation could, on the contrary, have been provided for, no one who is a spectator of the scenes around us and is a friend of humanity and freedom, can fail to regret that it was not done."