undred dollars began to be worth six hundred
dollars. That knocked away one third of adherence to the moral law. Then
they became worth seven hundred dollars, and half the law went; then,
eight or nine hundred dollars, and there was no such thing as moral law;
then, one thousand or twelve hundred dollars,--and slavery became one of
the Beatitudes."

Therefore, when in 1818 the territory of Missouri applied for admission
to the Union as a State, the South was greatly excited by the
proposition from Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, that its admission should
be conditioned upon the prohibition of slavery within its limits. It was
a revelation to the people of the North that so bitter a feeling should
be aroused by opposition to the extension of an acknowledged evil, which
had been abolished in all their own States. The Southern leaders, on
their side, maintained that Congress could not, under the Constitution,
legislate on such a subject,--that it was a matter for the States alone
to decide; and that slavery was essential to the prosperity of the
Southern States, as white men could not labor in the cotton and rice
fields. The Northern orators maintained that not only had the right of
Congress to exclude slavery from the Territories been generally
admitted, but that it was a demoralizing institution and more injurious
to the whites even than to the blacks. The Southern leaders became
furiously agitated, and threatened to secede from the Union rather than
submit to Northern dictation; while at the North the State legislatures
demanded the exclusion of slaves from Missouri.

Carl Schurz, in his admirable life of Clay, makes a pertinent summary:
"The slaveholders watched with apprehension the steady growth of the
Free States in population, wealth, and power.... As the slaveholders
had no longer the ultimate extinction, but now the perpetuation, of
slavery in view, the question of sectional power became one of first
importance to them, and with it the necessity of having more slave
States for the purpose of maintaining the political equilibrium, at
least in the Senate. A struggle for more slave States was to them a
struggle for life."

Thus the two elements of commercial profit and political power were
involved in the struggle of the South for the maintenance and extension
of slavery.

The House of Representatives in 1819 adopted the Missouri bill with the
amendment restricting slavery, but the Senate did not concur; and
Alabam