MCHS is a not-for-profit corporation organized in 1976 with Federal 501(c)(3) status. We have a modest endowment from donations and memorials. The principal source of income is dues and donations. There are no paid employees or consultants, nor expense accounts for volunteers.

 

The Missourian newspaper's series on Missouri River flooding recently included this article: Uprooted and uphill: How a small Missouri village moved off the flood plain about the Great Flood of 1993.

 

200 years ago, as 1820 dawned, enthusiasm for Missouri statehood again reached a high pitch. Memorials petitioning for statehood had been sent to the United States Congress as early as 1817. A statehood bill had been introduced in the United States House of Representatives in 1818, but amended to severely restrict, and ultimately ban, slavery in a new state of Missouri. This caused an unresolvable conflict with the Senate, which thought the question should be left to state discretion. Establishment of boundaries of the proposed state had been the subject of extended debate during much of 1819. By December, 1819 the boundaries questions were resolved; and, on December 18, 1819, the Missouri memorials, with no slavery restrictions, were again placed before the United States Congress and debated throughout the balance of 1819. Expectations for passage of a statehood bill were high.
 
But along came the citizens of Maine in December, 1819, with a petition to Congress to be admitted as a new state. The petition followed a popular vote earlier in the year to become separated from Massachusetts. The House of Representatives passed the Maine bill January 3, 1820, and sent it to the Senate, where it was referred to the Judiciary Committee, which also had a Missouri bill before it. The Judiciary Committee reported the Maine bill favorably to the full Senate with the Missouri bill, as an amendment to the Maine bill.
 
Parliamentary jockeying resulted. An effort to separate the two bills for the proposed new states, Maine and Missouri, failed. Senator Jonathon Roberts of Pennsylvania offered an amendment to the Missouri amendment to the Maine bill excluding the further introduction of slavery into Missouri. This seemed to be repeating the legislative experience of 1818-1819 and was defeated. Then, in what became the first "Missouri Compromise," Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois introduced a bill that prohibited slavery in the territory of the United States north and west of the proposed state of Missouri. The southern boundary of Missouri, latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes north, was to be the line between free and slave states. The entire "Missouri question” being before the Senate, it was debated there for the rest of January. Record of the debate covers some 200 pages of the Senate Journal.
 
The House of Representatives took up the statehood question on January 24, 1820. Until February 16 it was the only issue of non-routine importance being considered. It is obvious that the question of slavery in the United States was already of primary concern to the 44 year old country some 40 years before it erupted into civil war.