Page:The Slave Struggle in America.djvu/24

 the following year the House considered a Bill authorising it to form a constitution and enter the Union. An amendment was proposed, providing that all persons born after the admission of Missouri should be free, and also for the gradual emancipation of those who were then slaves. The House sustained the amendment by seventy-nine votes to sixty-seven. This rendered the Southerners excited and violent. The representative from Virginia accused Mr. Livermore (of New Hampshire), who had made a most eloquent speech in support of the amendment, of attempting to excite a servile war. As usual, dissolution of the Union was threatened; and the representative from Georgia declared that the Abolitionists were kindling a fire which "could be extinguished only in blood." The clause forbidding the introduction of slavery, and a modified clause providing that children born after the admission of the State should be set free at the age of thirty-five, was passed by the House. The Senate, by large majorities, struck these clauses out of the Bill. The House, by a very narrow majority, refused to concur. Neither would yield, and the Bill for the admission of Missouri was lost.

In the following December, territorial government was asked for the southern part of the Missouri Territory, to be called the Arkansas Territory. The prohibition of slavery was moved, and Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, accused the supporters of this motion with being under the influence of what he was pleased to call "Negrophobia." An angry debate upon this motion ended in the Bill passing the House without any restriction on slavery. In the Senate a motion of the Pennsylvania senator to prohibit slavery was lost, and Arkansas was delivered into the hands of the slaveholders.

Once more the Missouri Bill came on for discussion, and again the House and the Senate disagreed. Heated discussions in the two Chambers resulted in a most disastrous compromise. The Senate wanted Maine included in the Missouri Bill, but consented to yield this point if the House would strike out the prohibition of slavery, and insert its inhibition in the territories ceded by France north 36° 30′ parallel. By this not only the Territory of Arkansas, but the State of Missouri were abandoned to the demoralising influence of the slaveholder.

So great was the agitation caused by these long and acrimonious debates, so triumphant was the South at the result, that Jefferson himself was alarmed and shrank back, declaring, as Henry Wilson says, that the fury of the strife fell on his ear "like the fire-bell at midnight." The whole of the North was greatly excited. Public meetings were held and memorials and petitions sent in to Congress. The legislature of Pennsylvania unanimously supported the prohibition of slavery in Missouri; they said that bringing Missouri into the Union as a slaveholding state was a measure which would "spread the crimes and