the influence of Henry Clay, there was adopted a
compromise whose main provisions were (1) that Maine was to be admitted
as a free state; (2) that in Missouri there was to be no prohibition of
slavery; but (3) that slavery was to be prohibited in any other states
that might be formed out of the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of
36 deg. 30'.

By this agreement the strife was allayed for some years; but it is now
evident that the Missouri Compromise was only a postponement of the
ultimate contest and that the social questions involved were hardly
touched. Certainly the significance of the first clear drawing of the
line between the sections was not lost upon thoughtful men. Jefferson
wrote from Monticello in 1820: "This momentous question, like a
fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered
it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the
moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.... I can
say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would
sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in
any _practicable_ way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it
is misnamed, is a bagatelle that would not cost me a second thought,
if, in that way, a general emancipation and _expatriation_ could be
effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might
be."[1] For the time being, however, the South was concerned mainly
about immediate dangers; nor was this section placed more at ease by
Denmark Vesey's attempted insurrection in 1822.[2] A representative
South Carolinian,[3] writing after this event, said, "We regard our
Negroes as the _Jacobins_ of the country, against whom we should always
be upon our guard, and who, although we fear no permanent effects from
any insurrectionary movements on their part, should be watched with an
eye of steady and unremitted observation." Meanwhile from a ratio of
43.72 to 56.28 in 1790 the total Negro population in South Carolina had
by 1820 come to outnumber the white 52.77 to 47.23, and the tendency
was increasingly in favor of the Negro. The South, the whole country in
fact, was more and more being forced to consider not only slavery but
the ultimate reaches of the problem.

[Footnote 1: _Writings_, XV, 249.]

[Footnote 2: See Chapter VII, Section 1.]

[Footnote 3: Holland: _A Refutation of Calumnies_, 61.]

Whatever one might think of the conclusion--and in this c