{"id":19158,"date":"2012-12-14T05:50:28","date_gmt":"2012-12-14T10:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=19158"},"modified":"2012-12-14T05:50:28","modified_gmt":"2012-12-14T10:50:28","slug":"this-day-in-legal-history-alabama-statehood-and-a-new-era-of-slavery-compromises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2012\/12\/this-day-in-legal-history-alabama-statehood-and-a-new-era-of-slavery-compromises\/","title":{"rendered":"This Day in Legal History\u2014Alabama Statehood and a New Era of Slavery Compromises"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On December 14, 1819, Alabama was admitted to the Union as the twenty-second state. The admission itself was not especially remarkable. Various parts of present-day Alabama had been settled by the French (and later the British) since the early 1700s, and explored by the Spanish as early as the 1540s. The territory to the west, moreover, had already been admitted as the states of Mississippi (1817) and Louisiana (1814). Not least important, Alabama\u2019s soil and climate were amenable to cotton production, which was accelerating due to technological innovation and increased demand, such that the years preceding Alabama\u2019s statehood had seen substantial growth in the region\u2019s population.<\/p>\n

What made Alabama\u2019s admission significant, politically and constitutionally, was the situation it then posed for Congress regarding the admission of subsequent<\/em> states, particularly west of the Mississippi River. Specifically, the nation was now evenly divided between free and slave states, having eleven of each. Given a federal Senate based on equal voting for every state regardless of population, this resulting parity of free and slave states made the admission of any additional state an opportunity either to expand or to restrict slavery. The South especially perceived the need to maintain parity as its influence in the House of Representatives declined relative to the North, which was experiencing (and would continue to experience) more immigration as well as greater industrial and economic growth.<\/p>\n

This dynamic, in turn, set the stage for a new era of anti- and pro-slavery compromises and eventually\u2014as these compromises less and less alleviated sectional tensions\u2014a rather bloody civil war. To be sure, pending before Congress around the time of Alabama\u2019s statehood was the possible admission of two other states, Maine and Missouri. Maine, which at that time was a district of Massachusetts, would presumably be admitted as a free state. Less certain, though, was slavery\u2019s precise status in the state to be carved from the Missouri Territory, north of the Arkansaw (later Arkansas) Territory and part of the original Louisiana Territory. There were already slaves in the Missouri Territory, though not a great number of them, and it was proposed in the House of Representatives that slavery in the new state should not be expanded, whether by importation or by birth.<\/p>\n

What emerged in early March of 1820, less than three months after Alabama\u2019s admission, was the so-called Missouri Compromise: Maine would be admitted as a free state (and was on March 15, 1820), Missouri would be admitted as a slave state (and was on August 10, 1821), and slavery would otherwise be prohibited north of the 36\u00b030\u2032 parallel, Missouri\u2019s southern border.<\/p>\n

Compromises over slavery were, of course, nothing new to the United States. The three-fifths formula for enumeration, the protection of slave importation until 1808, and the Fugitive Slave Clause were all written into the Constitution, the nation\u2019s foundational charter. But the Missouri Compromise did something different: it recognized in express statutory terms the sectional character of the South\u2019s \u201cpeculiar institution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until then, the division between free and slave states east of the Mississippi River had largely rested upon topography (the Ohio River) and upon Mason and Dixon’s Line, the result of a survey conducted in the 1760s. In combination with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise had now codified this sectionalism, legally demarcating two realms within the United States\u2014one composed of exclusively northern free states, the other of basically southern slave states\u2014and thus more forcefully established, in Lincoln\u2019s later words, a \u201chouse divided against itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Thomas Jefferson lamented in April of 1820, upon learning of the Compromise, \u201ca 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.\u201d Jefferson, having a statesman\u2019s cognizance, was basically correct in his estimation. Not only was the 1820 Missouri Compromise not the last of the county\u2019s compromises over slavery, it essentially became a template for the subsequent treatment of the slavery question and for the future admission of states\u2014and there were indeed to be more states\u2014with each compromise increasingly incurring \u201cthe angry passions of men\u201d and entrenching \u201cdeeper and deeper\u201d the nation\u2019s North-South sectionalism.<\/p>\n

In the decades that followed the Missouri Compromise, America\u2019s population continued to rise, especially in the North; its territory continued to expand, particularly with the annexation of Texas in 1845, the delineation of the Oregon Territory in 1848, and the acquisition, also in 1848, of the remaining southwest by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; and these factors ensured the continued westward expansion of its people, accelerated by events such as the discovery of gold in California in 1848.<\/p>\n

The political and statutory outcome of these developments was the so-called Compromise of 1850, which entailed the admission of California as a free state, the partial undoing of the Missouri Compromise (by leaving the slavery issue to majority decision or \u201cpopular sovereignty\u201d in the newly formed New Mexico and Utah Territories, even above parallel 36\u00b030\u2032 north), and the passage of a powerful new fugitive slave law that required, under threat of criminal penalty, the arrest and return of runaway slaves. (The Missouri Compromise\u2019s geographical slavery prohibition was conclusively undone by the Kansas- Nebraska Act of 1854, which also left the question of slavery to local popular decision, and was then deemed void by the Supreme Court\u2019s 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Eventually the capacity to yield acceptable and effective compromises was so diminished by sectional distrust and perceived sectional disparities in power or influence that the country, by 1860, faced disunion and the genuine threat of civil war. Southerners and Northerners perceived each other as having not simply different cultures, but different (and rather unflattering) moral characters. The nationwide two-party system that had brought about the compromises of the preceding decades had by the mid-1850s dissolved and was replaced with sectional parties, the Democrats in the South and the Republicans in the North. And the U.S. Supreme Court\u2014with rulings such as Prigg v. Pennsylvania<\/em> (1842), Dred Scott v. Sandford<\/em> (1857), and Ableman v. Booth<\/em> (1859)\u2014seemed, at least to Northerners, to be aligned overwhelmingly with the interests of the slaveholding South. In short, several of the core components of the nation\u2019s political and legal system had been manifestly fractured along a geographic axis dividing North and South, rendering the system increasingly incapable of handling the affairs of the country as a unified whole.<\/p>\n

The foregoing tale of sectional disunion subsequent to Alabama\u2019s admission as a state might seem too attenuated to attribute it in any significant way to Alabama\u2019s statehood by itself, and that is an entirely reasonable if not correct assessment. Nevertheless, might Alabama\u2019s admission to the Union still be considered a cause of the Civil War? In a limited sense, it certainly can be, for the chain of causal events quite clearly includes it. Of course, the causal chain as broadly conceived might also include the admission of Mississippi and Illinois in the preceding two years, and it should most definitely include a host of non-legal developments such as Eli Whitney\u2019s cotton gin, Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, and John Brown\u2019s raid on the federal armory at Harper\u2019s Ferry.<\/p>\n

Alabama\u2019s statehood is only causal in a limited sense, though, because the events that were to transpire over the four decades following 1819 would likely have occurred in some form or another, whether sooner or later, and it is difficult to contend that a major sectional conflict of some kind could have been averted simply by altering one or even a few points in the nation\u2019s chronology. To put it another way, Alabama\u2019s admission to the Union is a logical and convenient point to enter the sequential narrative leading up to the American Civil War, but it is by no means a determinative element of that narrative.<\/p>\n

What is less debatable, of course, is the central role of the law, its institutions, and its officers and participants in the significant events that define the nation\u2019s antebellum period. Whatever one might think about the admission of any particular state, it cannot be doubted the overall process of admitting states\u2014as constitutionally ordained and legislatively implemented\u2014was a pivotal and recurring component of the pre-Civil War chronology. Lawyers, judges, and legislators, in other words, were thus key players in the dynamic that did eventually culminate in the Civil War, just as they were key players in post-war reconstruction.<\/p>\n

What any of us would have done in the decades leading up to 1860, were we<\/em> the lawyers, judges, or legislators of that era, is difficult to fathom, particularly if we did not know, as they did not, that the nation would eventually resolve the slavery question only after four years of military conflict, the economic destruction of the South, the deaths of at least 620,000 soldiers, and the assassination of a U.S. President.<\/p>\n

Further Reading<\/em><\/p>\n

William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828-1856<\/em> (1978).<\/p>\n

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848<\/em> (2007).<\/p>\n

Earl M. Maltz, Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861<\/em> (2009).<\/p>\n

David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: American Before the Civil War, 1848-1861<\/em> (1976).<\/p>\n

Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859<\/em> (2008).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On December 14, 1819, Alabama was admitted to the Union as the twenty-second state. The admission itself was not especially remarkable. Various parts of present-day Alabama had been settled by the French (and later the British) since the early 1700s, and explored by the Spanish as early as the 1540s. The territory to the west, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,126,64,122,57,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress-congressional-power","category-constitutional-law","category-legal-history","category-public","category-race-and-the-law","category-us-supreme-court","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}