'A House Divided' (1)

The United States in 1819
Public domain

The Missouri Compromise (1820)

Even before the rise of the abolitionists, the question of slavery was a dominant concern. As a result of the North-West Ordinance and the pattern of migration, new states were coming into the Union. Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), and Illinois (1818) were carved out of the old North-West territory, and they had been set up as free states. The South had balanced this with the creation of Louisiana (1812), Mississippi (1817), and Alabama (1819) so that by 1819 the country had an equal number of free and slave states, eleven of each. 

In 1819 the House of Representatives was asked to approve legislation enabling Missouri Territory to draft a state constitution, its population having passed the minimum of 60,000. In the westward rush of population, settlers had flocked to the area, through the old French town of St Louis and then on to the Mississippi. Most of these settlers came from the South so that the territory now had 10,000 slaves.  From December 1819 to March 1820 the House fiercely debated the terms on which Missouri should be given the status of a state. Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed that Missouri only be admitted as a state if it undertook to forbid further slave immigration and to provide freedom at the age of twenty-five for those born after admission.  This was passionately opposed by the Southern states. Senator William Pinkney of Maryland  argued that the new states should have the same freedom as the original thirteen, and be thus free to choose slavery if they wished. 

Eventually, in February 1820 Congress accepted the compromise

Henry Clay
'The Great Pacifier'

proposed by the Speaker of the House Henry Clay. The Missouri Compromise decreed that in future slavery would be excluded from all parts of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36⁰ 30/, apart from Missouri. At the same time Maine would be admitted to the Union as a free state. The Compromise was signed by President Monroe on 6 March. On 10 August1821 Missouri was admitted as the twenty-fourth state.

The Missouri Compromise won for Clay the title of the Great Pacifier. It can be seen as a squalid deal, but it can also be argued that it postponed the war for a generation. Thomas Jefferson wrote: 

‘This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.’

The Thirteen Colonies

The Spanish explorations

The Spaniards were the first Europeans to reach the New World, and by the sixteenth century they were exploring the territory that became the United States. The earliest known exploration of Florida was made in 1513 by Juan Ponce de Léon, the governor of Puerto Rico. In 1539 Hernando de Soto  landed on the west coast of Florida with 620 men and 220 horses. His expedition travelled north into Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. In 1541 they reached the Mississippi River, crossed it and travelled westward through modern day Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. 

Discovery of the Mississippi
by William Henry Powell (1823–1879)
 This fanciful depiction hangs
in the United States Capitol rotunda.

De Soto died on the expedition, which failed in its objective to acquire gold and establish colonies. But in 1565 the Spaniards founded St Augustine, Florida, the first European town in the present-day United States. The colony included a fort, church, hospital fish market and over a hundred shops and houses, built decades before the first English settlements. 

In 1609 they founded Santa Fe in New Mexico. This became the first centre of mission activity in the south-west.  Missionaries, particularly Franciscans and Jesuits, established mission settlements in which the Indians were persuaded to live and to convert to Catholicism. By 1630 there were fifty Catholic churches and friaries in New Mexico and some 3,000 Spaniards. 

Other European powers

While the Spaniards were establishing their missions, other European powers arrived on the American Continent, notably the French, the Dutch, and the English. 


The eventual dominance of British settlements was not inevitable and did not initially seem likely.  The Dutch were the first northern European settlers. In 1609 Henry Hudson, an English navigator employed by the Dutch East India Company sailed up what became the Hudson river, and in 1625 the Dutch East India Company established Niew Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, purchased from the local Lenape Indians.