Page:EB1911 - Volume 18.djvu/643

 immediate and unconditional emancipation they swept the state in November 1864. By the constitution of 1865 slavery was abolished outright. The convention of 1861, by maintaining continuous government, had saved the state from anarchy and from reconstruction by the national power; but an ironclad test oath (it required denial of forty-five distinct offences) was provided, to be taken by all voters, state, county and municipal officers, lawyers, jurors, teachers and clergymen. Its attempted enforcement was a grave error of judgment, and was attended by great abuses, and it was finally held unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. The legislature, however, maintained its ends by registration laws that reduced to impotence the Democratic electorate. The Radical Republicans held control until 1870, when they were defeated by a combination of Liberal Republicans and Democrats, and the test-oath and the rest of the intolerant legislation of the war period were swept away. In 1872, the Democrats gained substantial control, and after 1876 their power was established beyond challenge. The constitution of 1875 closed the war period with blanket amnesties. Though in politics habitually Democratic, Missouri has generally had a strong opposition party—Whig in antebellum days, and since the war, Republican—which in recent years has made political conditions increasingly unstable. This instability is shown in congressional and local rather than in general state elections. In 1908 a Republican governor was elected, the first for more than thirty years.

 MISSOURI COMPROMISE, an agreement (1820) between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the public territories. A bill to enable the people of Missouri to form a state government preliminary to admission into the Union came before the House of Representatives in Committee of the Whole, on the 13th of February 1819. An amendment offered by James Tallmadge (1778–1853) of New York, which provided that the further introduction of slaves into Missouri should be forbidden, and that all children of slave parents born in the state after its admission should be free at the age of twenty-five, was adopted by the committee and incorporated in the Bill as finally passed (Feb. 17) by the house. The Senate refused to concur in the amendment and the whole measure was lost. During the following session (1819–1820), the house passed a similar bill with an amendment introduced on the 26th of January 1820 by John W. Taylor (1784–1854) of New York making the admission of the state conditional upon its adoption of a constitution prohibiting slavery. In the meantime the question had been complicated by the admission in December of Alabama, a slave state (the number of slave and free states now becoming equal), and by the passage through the house (Jan. 3, 1820) of a bill to admit Maine, a free state. The Senate decided to connect the two measures, and passed a bill for the admission of Maine with an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to form a state constitution. Before the bill was returned to the house a second amendment was adopted on the motion of J. B. Thomas (1777–1850) of Illinois, excluding slavery from the “Louisiana Purchase” north of 36° 30′ (the southern boundary of Missouri), except within the limits of the proposed state of Missouri. The House of Representatives refused to accept this and a conference committee was appointed. There was now a controversy between the two houses not only