The phrase “era of good feelings” applied to the Administration of President Monroe is a misnomer. It is descriptive neither of politics nor of business and industry, for the historic Democratic party was all but rent by bitter personal animosities, and the country was prostrated by a severe industrial crisis.

The first symptoms of hard times appeared in the early months of the year 1819. Undoubtedly the causes of the crisis were world-wide; but local conditions go far to explain the industrial collapse in the United States. All indications point to the conclusion that the country was experiencing the inevitable reaction from a period of too rapid commercial expansion and of unsound speculation. The high prices of commodities after the war had given a sort of fictitious prosperity to industry and trade, and had encouraged unduly the spirit of commercial enterprise. On credit easily secured from wild-cat banks, the Western pioneer had bought lands beyond the purchasing power of his own meager capital; and the speculator in turn had borrowed money to secure title to lands which he would unload upon unsuspecting settlers. State banks had met these demands by liberal issues of notes which were imperfectly covered by their specie reserves. It needed only a sudden demand for liquidation to cause widespread distress.

The unwise management of the National Bank may have contributed to the approaching disaster. The branch banks in the South and West had loaned freely, issuing notes which were payable at any branch of the National Bank. Capital was thus diverted from the East to sections of the country where there was least conservatism in banking. In 1818, the directors of the Bank became alarmed at the excessive expansion of credit, and issued instructions which compelled the redemption of notes at the bank where they were issued. At the same time the branch banks curtailed their loans. This sudden reversal of policy caused a fearful pressure which was transmitted from creditor to debtor all along the line.

Every sufferer by the panic was disposed to blame the National Bank for his misfortunes, particularly as it was common rumor that the directors of the Bank had speculated in its stock and had used their influence to cripple local banks. Congress had been obliged to take cognizance of these charges and to appoint a committee to investigate the condition of the institution. On the report of this committee, in January, 1819, the stock of the Bank fell from 140 to 93. The investigation revealed nothing worse than mismanagement; but a vigorous effort was made in Congress to revoke the charter.

The widespread hostility of the West and South toward the National Bank was born at this time. Everywhere it was known as “the Monster.” State after State passed acts to tax the branch banks out of existence. The decision of Chief Justice Marshall, to be sure, in the famous case of M’Culloch v. Maryland, declared emphatically that the States had no constitutional power to tax the branches of an institution chartered under the laws of the United States; nevertheless, the legislature of Ohio deliberately levied such a tax, and when resistance was offered to its collection, withdrew the protection of the State from the branch banks. Feeling themselves the victims of the money power, the people in many of the Western States resorted to the remedies which were broached during hard times under the Confederation. Kentucky became notorious by reason of its laws in behalf of the debtor class. In every Western State there was a disposition to seek shelter from the operation of federal law behind the aegis of State rights. The people of these newer communities were slow to accept the force of precedent in cases decided by the federal courts. Andrew Jackson voiced this feeling when he became President. “Mere precedent,” said he, “is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power, except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered as well settled.”

That there was much real suffering during this panic admits of no doubt. Niles estimated that not less than twenty thousand persons were seeking employment in Philadelphia in the summer of 1819, and quite as many wandering in the streets of New York looking for work. In both cities soup-houses were established by private charitable societies to relieve distress in the following winter. In the city of New York, during the year 1816, over nineteen hundred unfortunates were imprisoned for debt; and of these, over seven hundred owed less than twenty-five dollars.

But it was not merely the city dweller who felt the pinch of poverty. Thousands of Western settlers who had purchased land under the Act of 1800, which permitted deferred payments, found themselves insolvent. More than $21,000,000, one fifth of the national debt, remained unpaid in the year 1820. To the importunities of these debtors Congress had yielded from time to time, but it was not until 1821 that it passed the first general relief act. Those who had not completed their payments within the prescribed five years were then permitted to give up the land which they had not paid for, and to apply the payments already made to the full purchase of the lands which they retained. Arrears of interest were remitted.

In 1820, Congress passed an act which wrought a far-reaching change in the disposal of the public domain. The credit system was abolished outright. After July 1, 1820, land was to be sold for cash at a minimum price of a dollar and a quarter an acre, and in eighty-acre tracts. A payment of one hundred dollars, then, would make a settler the owner of eighty acres in his own right. The prospect of actual ownership of a small tract made him far less ready to listen to the voice of the tempter in the form of the speculator, who had heretofore lured him to make larger purchases on credit than he could ever pay for by the labor of his hands.

In the midst of this period of financial depression, the Territory of Missouri applied for admission into the Union. On February 13, 1819, while an enabling act was under consideration in the House of Representatives, James Tallmadge, of New York, moved an amendment which touched Southern interests to the quick. “And provided, That the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly 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.”

This bold attempt to prevent the spread of slavery provoked a brief but momentous debate. Clay left the Speaker’s chair to remonstrate, “in the name of humanity,” against a policy which could result, he believed, only in the misery of the slaves of the South. The lot of the negro would be vastly improved if the unfortunate people were more widely dispersed. Taylor, of New York, called this a specious plea. “It is that humanity,” said he, “which seeks to palliate disease by the application of nostrums, which scatter its seeds through the whole system.” To open the West to slavery would be simply to create an additional demand for the importation of slaves. Of those Southern Representatives who took part in this debate, not a man posed as the defender of slavery in the abstract. Barbour, of Virginia, frankly admitted that slavery “like all other human things is mixed with good and evil-the latter, no doubt, preponderating.” And Johnson, of Kentucky, maintained that though slavery might be a necessary evil, “not incompatible with true religion,” even so “slavery must still be a bitter draught.”

What rankled in the breasts of all Southern men was the insinuation that their social system was founded on hypocrisy and tyranny. Tallmadge commented with biting sarcasm on the willingness of Southern gentlemen to contribute to missionary enterprises for the uplifting of the Hottentots and Hindus, and their determination to keep their African slaves in ignorance. And his colleague contrasted the plantations, overrun with weeds on one side of Mason and Dixon’s line, with the cultivated farms on the other: in Pennsylvania, he observed “a neat, blooming, animated, rosy-cheeked peasantry”; in Maryland, “a squalid, slow-motioned black population.” These were barbed shafts which left sore wounds.

When the Union was formed, African negroes were held in servitude in all but two of the States. At the time of this debate, slavery had been abolished, or was on the way to ultimate extinction, in every State north of Maryland and Delaware. Climate rather than humanitarian considerations sealed the fate of slavery at the North; and climate, in the last analysis, fastened African slavery on the South. As the South became committed to the raising of a staple, and that staple cotton, the negro was regarded as an indispensable factor in plantation economy. There were far-sighted individuals, it is true, who deprecated slavery on humanitarian grounds; but they were, for the most part, citizens of border States where the profitableness of negro labor was less apparent. Even in these communities opposition to slavery was tempered by dread of what emancipation might bring in its train. The history of Santo Domingo revealed the hideous possibilities of a negro insurrection. No father of a family could contemplate with equanimity the proximity of a large body of free, semi-civilized blacks. For a time even prominent slaveholders favored the aims of the Colonization Society which proposed to deport emancipated blacks to the African coast. So late as 1820 the Governor of Virginia recommended an appropriation by the legislature for the emancipation and removal of the negroes.

Although slavery was a local institution, and regulated by state law, its existence was recognized by the Federal Convention of 1787. The arrangement which obtained under the old Confederation, whereby five slaves were to count as three whites in apportioning representation and taxes, was continued; the mutual obligation of the States to return fugitives from justice and labor was distinctly stated in the Constitution; and the slave trade was permitted to continue at least to the year 1808.

In 1793, Congress had met its constitutional obligations by enacting a law for the return of fugitive slaves; and in 1794, Congress passed an act-“the first national act against the slave trade”-which prohibited all trade in slaves from the United States to any foreign country. By the opening of the new century all the States had forbidden the importation of slaves from abroad. But in 1803, South Carolina again legalized the slave trade; and in 1805, Congress after a brief interdiction removed all restrictions upon the importation of slaves into the Louisiana Territory. The slave trade at once assumed alarming proportions. It was officially stated that between 1803 and 1807, 39,075 negroes were brought into the port of Charleston. Eighteen hundred of these unfortunate blacks were imported in American vessels. One half of the consignees of these slavers were Americans, of whom thirteen were natives of Charleston and eighty-eight of Rhode Island.

This traffic, coupled with the alarm caused by negro insurrections in the West Indies, prepared the public mind for positive action, as the year approached when Congress might constitutionally prohibit the foreign slave trade. The Act of March 2, 1807, however, only partially met the expectations of the anti-slavery people. The African slave trade was forbidden, but negroes illegally imported were to be disposed of as the legislatures of the several States should determine. There was reason to fear that the Southern States would neglect to legislate on this important matter, and that the act would be indifferently enforced. Moreover, the coastwise slave trade for purposes of sale was not interdicted, but forbidden only in vessels under forty tons burden.

That the Act of 1807 did not prevent the African slave trade was patent to every one who knew conditions in the Southern Seaboard States; but the extent of this traffic can only be surmised. During the debates on the Missouri Bill, Tallmadge stated that fourteen thousand negroes had been brought into the country within the last year, and the statement was not challenged.

When the Missouri controversy was renewed in the session of December, 1819, the number of free States equaled the number of slave States. The addition of a twenty-third State, then, would unsettle the equilibrium between the sections in the Senate. A growing antagonism based upon widely different economic and social organizations was coming to be felt-felt rather than clearly perceived and openly recognized. In the year 1800, the two sections had been nearly equal in population; in 1820, the North outnumbered the South by over half a million. This disparity in numbers had a direct political significance, for the national House of Representatives was beyond all question controlled by the delegations from the free States. No great prescience was needed to warn the South that in self-defense it must maintain the even balance of sections in the Senate. The contest for Missouri was therefore essentially “a struggle for sectional domination.”

The Tallmadge amendment was passed by the House, but rejected by the Senate, after a heated debate which convinced Southern statesmen that there was a distinct anti-slavery sentiment at the North. The adjournment of Congress threw the whole controversy into the crucible of public opinion. The latent hostility of men and women with humanitarian sympathies was at once raised to white heat. Mass meetings in city, town, and county passed resolutions against the spread of slavery and the admission of more slave States. Yet it can hardly be said that the public conscience was deeply touched. The leaven of abolitionism had to work many years before it could produce results in politics.

The whole question assumed a new guise when Congress met in December, 1820. The people of Maine had held a convention and formed a constitution, and were now applying for admission as a State. Here was a free State which would offset Missouri if it were admitted as a slave State. When the House passed a bill to admit Maine, the Senate promptly attached to it, as a “rider,” a bill for the admission of Missouri without any prohibition of slavery. It was to this bill that Senator Thomas, of Illinois, representing a constituency divided against itself on the subject of slavery, offered an amendment in the nature of a compromise. He would admit Missouri as a slave State, but prohibit slavery forever in the rest of the old Province of Louisiana north of 36 deg. 30’. The Senate accepted this amendment and sent the bill to the House. Here the original Maine Bill was stripped of the rider and the Thomas amendment by large majorities. Shortly after this vigorous assertion of independence, the House passed a bill for the admission of Missouri with the prohibition of slavery. The deadlock seemed complete.

The constitutional aspects of the problem called forth some exceedingly able argumentation. Those who favored imposing a restriction upon Missouri argued, plausibly enough, that as Congress was given the power to admit new States, so it was fully warranted in exercising discretion and refusing to admit. Precedents existed for imposing restrictions. Three States carved out of the Northwest Territory had been admitted on condition that their constitutions should not be repugnant to the sixth article of the Ordinance of 1787. The State of Louisiana had been admitted under explicit conditions. It was fully competent for Congress, by virtue of its authority over Territories, to regulate all the stages in the process of framing a constitution, and then to give or to withhold its approval.

The most brilliant argument on the other side was made by William Pinkney, of Maryland. Conceding that the power of Congress was discretionary, he insisted that Congress might not exact terms which would interfere with the results to be accomplished. “What, then,” he asked, “is the professed result? To admit a State into this Union. What is that Union?... An equal Union between parties equally sovereign.... It is into that Union that a new State is to come. By acceding to it the new State is placed on the same footing with the original States.... If it comes in shorn of its beams-crippled and disparaged beyond the original States-it is not into the original Union that it comes.... The first was a Union inter pares; this is a Union between disparates, between giants and a dwarf, between power and feebleness, between full proportioned sovereignties and a miserable image of power.”

Yet there were Senators and Representatives from the North who would not be diverted from the discussion of the larger sectional and ethical issues involved in the extension of slavery. Chief among these was Rufus King, who then represented New York in the Senate. His cogent arguments made a profound impression. “The great slaveholders in the House,” Adams wrote in his journal, “gnawed their lips and clenched their fists as they heard him.”

Meantime, a joint committee of conference was endeavoring to reconcile the differences between the House and the Senate. The House was put at a disadvantage by the approach of March 4-when the consent of Massachusetts to the admission of Maine would expire. It was finally agreed that the Senate should pass the bill admitting Maine as a separate measure, while the House should accept the Missouri Bill with the Thomas amendment. Missouri, in short, was to come in as a slave State, but slavery was forever prohibited in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of her southern boundary. An analysis of the voting in the House of Representatives reveals no clear-cut sectional divisions, though it forecasts a time when slavery might split parties along sectional lines. In New England and the Middle States public opinion had not yet crystallized into inflexible opposition to the spread of slavery; but the Northwest was distinctly in favor of a restriction upon Missouri. The Southwest and the South were a unit in desiring the admission of Missouri as a slave State.

In the fall of 1820, the Missouri question in another form returned to vex Congress. When the constitution of the State was presented to Congress, it was found to contain a clause which excluded free negroes. Again the two houses locked horns. Passions rose again. The work of the preceding session seemed about to be undone. But under the persuasive leadership of Henry Clay, a joint committee elaborated a resolution which was acceptable to both houses. Missouri was to be admitted on the express condition that the offending clause in her constitution should never be construed so as to authorize the passing of any law by which any citizen of any of the States of the Union should be deprived of his privileges and immunities under the Federal Constitution. The legislature of Missouri was to give its solemn consent to this fundamental condition. Then, and not until then, the President was to declare Missouri a member of the Union. The State complied with the requirement, though in the same breath protesting that all this was an empty form, since Congress could not thus bind a State. On August 10, 1821, President Monroe declared Missouri a State of the Union.

In the midst of this exciting controversy, Monroe was reelected President. Nowhere but in Pennsylvania was there any serious opposition. Old distinctions of party had so far disappeared that the venerable ex-President John Adams was chosen as a presidential elector in Massachusetts, and voted with his fourteen colleagues-who were half Federalists and half Democrats-for James Monroe. In the electoral count Monroe lacked only a single vote of a unanimous election.

When the electoral vote was about to be counted, an embarrassing question arose with regard to the vote of Missouri. As the State had not yet complied with the condition imposed by Congress, its right to vote was challenged. Again Clay appeared in his rôle of compromiser. The delicate question was adroitly avoided by having the President of the Senate announce the electoral vote with and without the votes of Missouri. At last the Missouri question was disposed of; but words had been uttered which could not be recalled; and wounds had been inflicted which left scars. The South could never quite forget that it had been charged with conniving at crime in maintaining slavery. “You have kindled a fire,” said Cobb, of Georgia, to Tallmadge, “which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood only can extinguish.”