As the second session of the 16th U. S. Congress convened November 13, 1820, Missouri had:

Each house of Congress referred the Missouri Constitution to a committee, but the three congressmen were denied seats because Missouri had not been formally voted into the Union.

 

On December 11, 1820, the U. S. Senate, acting on the favorable vote of its committee, approved the Missouri Constitution and formal admission with the proviso that nothing in the Missouri Constitution should be construed as consent by Congress to contravention of the U. S. Constitutional provision (Article IV, Section 2) giving privileges and immunities of all citizens to the citizens of each state. This resolution as amended was sent to the U. S. House of Representatives for its approval. The House read the resolution the first time and tabled it. (An enactment in each house of Congress required three readings before passage.)

 

The House of Representatives committee favorably reported a resolution of its own to the full House recommending admission on November 29, noting that Delaware had a provision similar to the questionable language in Missouri Constitution Article 3, Section 26, requiring the General Assembly to pass laws to prevent free negroes and mulattoes from coming to and settling in the State. It further noted that whether this provision violated the United States Constitution was a question for the judiciary, not the Congress. The House resolution was given its first and second readings and referred to the entire House as a Committee of the Whole, where it was debated for a week before a vote defeating it 79 to 93 on December 13. Shoemaker in Missouri’s Struggle for Statehood, 1804-1821, attributes the action of the full House to Northern statesmen and their constituents, who were represented by a majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate, on the other hand was pretty well evenly split between slave and free states.

 

The parliamentary maneuvers in the U. S. House of Representatives all throughout its consideration of the “Missouri Question” are somewhat hard to follow because the House had before it, at the same time, the Senate’s resolution and various resolutions of its own and amendments thereto, both dealing with the same question.

 

The response in Missouri, seemingly taken by surprise by the inaction of the U. S. House of Representatives, was one of quiet determination. There were no public expressions of outrage or recrimination, although Senator-in-waiting Benton wrote in a St Louis newspaper that debate would show that about every State in the Union had the same provision in its laws as the offending provision in the Missouri Constitution. The official and private attitude, and that of the public, was that Missouri was a state, had been acting as such, and, after waiting more than three years because of an issue gripping the entire country, was determined to be formally admitted to the Union.

 

Missouri and the Nation went into 1821 still struggling with the question of admission of Missouri as a state in the Union.

 

This article is one of a series commemorating the 200th anniversary of Missouri’s steps toward statehood. See the previous articles in County History, Misc. Articles.