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Monroe was the President who presided over the period often referred to as the "Era of Good Feelings," though feelings were not as cordial as the era's title may lead one to believe. Federalists had been discredited by the Hartford Convention, in which they opposed the War of 1812. Late victories in that war made this position politically unpopular and the Federalist Party went into decline nationally. A new "amalgamated" Democratic-Republican party adopted some Federalist policies and institutions, and Monroe's goodwill tour of New England further served to erase party identities and marginalize any remaining Federalists.
The Era of Good Feelings strengthened the mood of the country towards protectionism and this led to the Tariff of 1816. Lessons from the War of 1812 also exposed the need for a strong central bank and the Second Bank of the United States had been incorporated. The war had called into question the Jeffersonian notions of strict construction of the Constitution, a limited central government, and commitments to the primacy of Southern agrarian interests. But rather than produce political harmony, as Monroe had hoped, intense rivalries developed among Democratic-Republicans.
The immense Louisiana Purchase territories had been acquired through federal executive action, followed by Republican legislative authorization in 1803 under President Thomas Jefferson. Prior to this purchase, the governments of Spain and France had already sanctioned and promoted slavery in the region and enslaved African Americans accounted for a large percentage of the non-Native American population in some of those regions. In 1804, Congress limited the further introduction of enslaved persons in that area to those who had been brought there by actual settlers.
In the 1805 territorial ordinance, Congress omitted any reference to slavery, and it was unclear why this was done. Some claimed that this omission was deliberate, and that the government intended to prohibit slavery in Missouri. In 1812, Louisiana became the first state to be carved out of the Louisiana Purchase. It entered the Union as a slave state. In the years after the War of 1812, the region, now known as Missouri Territory, experienced rapid settlement, largely by slaveholders who were planters. The land was not fit for growing cotton. The population of enslaved persons in Missouri rose from 3,101 in 1810 to 10,000 in 1820. Out of the total population of 67,000, about 15% of those living there were enslaved persons. By 1819, the population of Missouri Territory neared the threshold that would qualify it for statehood. The admission of Missouri Territory as a slave state was expected to be non-controversial. But when the Missouri statehood bill was debated in the House of Representatives on February 13, 1819, Representative James Tallmadge Jr. of New York proposed a very controversial amendment, which read:
Provided, that the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been fully convicted; and that all children born within the said State after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.
Tallmadge was a vocal opponent of slavery. The 41 year old Congressman had played a leading role in accelerating the emancipation of the remaining slaves in New York in 1817. When, shortly after proposing the amendment, Tallmadge fell ill, another New York Representative, John W. Taylor, stepped in to press the issue. Taylor was also an opponent of slavery and in February 1819, he had proposed a similar restriction for Arkansas Territory in the House. That resolution was defeated 89–87.
The controversy on the amendment and the future of slavery in the nation created dissension within the Democratic-Republican party. Northerners in the party formed a coalition across factional lines with the few remnants of the Federalists. Southerners in the party were united in their opposition to the amendment.
There were five Representatives from Maine, then a part of the state of Massachusetts, who were opposed to spreading slavery into new territories. They were Martin Kinsley, Joshua Cushman, Ezekiel Whitman, Enoch Lincoln, and James Parker and in 1820, they voted against the Missouri Compromise and also against Maine's independence. One of them wrote that if the North, and the nation agreed to any compromise, they would be allowing southern slaveholders to dominate the nation's politics, and that Americans "shall deserve to be considered a besotted and stupid race, fit, only, to be led blindfold; and worthy, only, to be treated with sovereign contempt".
The Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution remained in effect and added three-fifths of the enslaved population to a state's free population, with that total used for each state to calculate congressional districts and the number of delegates to the Electoral College. This greatly increased the South's influence in political affairs such as party caucuses, the appointment of judges, and the distribution of patronage. The most vocal opponents of the three-fifths clause had been the Federalists, but they were no longer a political force. Senator Rufus King of New York was the last Federalist icon still active on the national stage. He had been a signatory to the US Constitution, and he had strongly opposed the federal ratio in 1787. In debates in 1819, he revived his complaint that New England and the Mid-Atlantic States suffered unduly from the three-fifths clause. Tallmadge and Taylor were also opponents of the three-fifths clause, arguing that it resulted in political supremacy for the South.
In the Senate, the constitutional compromise of 1787 had provided for two senators per state, regardless of its population. The South, with its smaller free population than the North, benefited from that arrangement. Sectional parity in the Senate had been achieved through paired admissions, and at the time of the Missouri debate, the North and the South had 11 states each. Missouri statehood, with the Tallmadge Amendment approved, would meant a future influx of free states west of the Mississippi and a decline in southern political power. The Tallmadge Amendment was the first major challenge to the extension of slavery.
The debates in the 15th Congress focused mainly on constitutional questions while avoiding the moral aspects of slavery. On February 16, 1819, the House Committee of the Whole voted to link Tallmadge's provisions with the Missouri statehood legislation by 79–67. The debates in the House's 2nd session in 1819 lasted only three days and were quite rancorous. Representative Thomas Cobb of Georgia accused Tallmadge of having "kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish." Tallmadge responded by stating "If a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!"
In the House of Representatives, because of the North having a greater population, its membership outnumbered those from the South by a margin of 105 to 81. Each of Tallmadge's provisions passed along sectional lines, though not without some defections to the South. The vote was 87 to 76 for prohibition on further slave migration into Missouri and 82 to 78 for emancipating the offspring of slaves at 25. But when the enabling bill was passed to the Senate, and both parts of it were rejected: 22–16 against the restriction of new slaves in Missouri and 31–7 against the gradual emancipation for slave children born after statehood. The issue of Missouri statehood would be passed to the 16th Congress in December 1819.
The Missouri Compromise debates raised suspicions among supporters of slavery that Rufus King and others were conspiring to form a new antislavery party in the North, composed of old Federalists in combination with antislavery Republicans. King was re-elected to the US Senate in January 1820. Monroe and ex-President Thomas Jefferson believed that Federalists hoped to destabilize the Union. Jefferson wrote that he believed that a northern conspiracy was at play. There was also fear among Northerners that Southerners would form a Free State Party. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams thought that plans for the formation of such a party were already occurring.
The Northern region of Massachusetts, known as the District of Maine, no longer wanted to be part of a non-contiguous state after the War of 1812. It had sought admission into the United States as a free state. to become the separate state of Maine. It was not lost on Northerners that the admission of another slave state would increase southern power at a time when northern politicians had already begun to regret the Constitution's Three-Fifths Clause. Although more than 60 percent of the free population lived in the North, northern representatives held only a slim majority of congressional seats by 1818. Since each state had two Senate seats, Missouri's admission as a slave state would result in more southern than northern senators.
During the following session of Congress, the House passed a similar bill with an amendment, introduced on January 26, 1820, by John W. Taylor of New York, allowing Missouri into the union as a slave state. The question had been complicated by the admission in December of Alabama, a slave state, which made the number of slave and free states equal. There was also now a bill in through the House to admit Maine as a free state.
The Senate decided to connect the two measures. It passed a bill for the admission of Maine with an amendment enabling the people of Missouri to form a state constitution. The bill was returned to the House with a further compromise. A second amendment was adopted, on the motion of Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois, to exclude slavery from the Louisiana Territory north of 36°30 north, the southern boundary of Missouri, except within the limits of the proposed state of Missouri.
The vote in the Senate was 24-20 for the compromise. The amendment and the bill passed in the Senate on February 17 and February 18, 1820. The House then approved the Senate compromise amendment, 90–87, with all of the opposition coming from representatives from the free states. The House then approved the whole bill by a margin of 134–42 with all opposition coming from the southern states. The measures were passed on March 5, 1820, and signed by President James Monroe on March 6, 1820.
In the decades immediately afterward, Americans hailed the 1820 agreement as an essential compromise. The Compromise helped postpone the Civil War, though it obviously did not prevent the war from occurring. In a letter he wrote on April 22 to John Holmes, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the division of the country created by the Compromise Line would eventually lead to the destruction of the Union. He was right.
The debate over the admission of Missouri also raised the issue of sectional balance. The trend of admitting a new free or slave state to balance the status of previous ones would continue up until 1850. The next state to be admitted would be Arkansas (a slave state) in 1836, Michigan (a free state) in 1837, Texas and Florida (two slave states) in 1845 and Iowa and Wisconsin (two free states) in 1846 and 1848.
While the Missouri Compromise excluded slavery from US territory acquired since the Northwest Ordinance, it was still a deep disappointment to African Americans and to Abolitionists. While it had stopped the Southern progression of gradual emancipation, it also appeared to legitimize slavery as a southern institution.
The provisions of the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north were effectively repealed by Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854. The repeal of the Compromise caused further divisions and hastened the coming of the Civil War. It also caused a return to politics for a one-term Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln, and it led to the formation of the Republican Party.