When the northern district, around St. Louis, applied for admission as
the slave State of Missouri, the inevitable consequences of the act
of 1804 became evident for the first time, and all the Northern States
united to resist the admission. The North controlled the House
of Representatives, and the South the Senate; and, after a severe
parliamentary struggle, the two bodies united in the compromise of 1820.
By its terms Missouri was admitted as a slave State, and slavery was
forever forbidden in the rest of Louisiana Territory, north of latitude
36 deg. 30' (the line of the southerly boundary of Missouri). The instinct
of this first struggle against slavery extension seems to have been
much the same as that of 1846-60 the realization that a permission to
introduce slavery by custom into the Territories meant the formation
of slave States exclusively, the restriction of the free States to
the district between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and the final
conversion of the mass of the United States to a policy of enslavement
of labor.
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