The
admission of Vermont and Kentucky, a Northern and a Southern State,
maintained the ratio. It was continued farther by the admission of
Tennessee and Ohio, Louisiana and Indiana, Mississippi and Illinois.
This balance had been thus far an accident, depending upon the time
when a portion of land had sufficient population for statehood; but
it had become such a tacit understanding, that the admission of Alabama
in 1819, it was said, made the sections exactly equal in the number
of Senators. At almost the same time Missouri and Maine were ready.
The latter because of climate must undoubtedly be admitted as a free
State. The former must be given to slavery if the balance between the
two sections was to be maintained. But the extension of the line of
thirty-six thirty would make Missouri a free State. The location of
States heretofore admitted had been so indisputably upon the one side
or the other of the slavery-freedom line that uncertainty was
impossible. Missouri, as has been shown, lay right athwart the
extension.
There had been comparatively little anti-slavery agitation thus far,
being confined to attacks upon the slave trade and an occasional
petition from the Friends; yet the sentiment that slavery was an
economic evil was firmly established in the overstocked border slave
States, and that it was both an economic and moral evil was believed
by a growing number in the Northern States.
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