1. Missouri Compromise (1820)
By 1819, the United States were composed of twenty-two states, balanced between free states and slave states. In the late 1819, the Missouri Territory had almost reached the number necessary to apply for its statehood. Eager to be part of the Union, the Missouri Territory asked the Congress to be admitted as a slave state into the Union. Admitting the Missouri as slave state would have created a dissonance in the precarious equilibrium previously shaped between free and slave states. To find a solution to the issue, the New York Congressman James Tallmadge, who was against slavery, proposed an amendment called later after him. With this amendment he proposed to admit the Missouri Territory as a slave state into the Union under three basic guidelines: Missouri could keep its slaves until
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When in 1850 the California Territory asked to be admitted as a free state into the Union, many southerners opposed the request because they feared that that new admission would have upset the sectional balance in the Congress between free state representatives and slave state representatives. The Senator Henry Clay proposed a series of law later called under the common name of Compromise of 1850. According to these laws, California would be admitted into the Union as free slave; to balance it there would be created two new slave states, Utah and New Mexico, where slavery had to be determined by popular sovereignty; slavery in Washington D.C. would be ended; and finally the issuing of the Fugitive Slave Act that made easier for the southern to recover fugitive slaves. Even though the Compromise of 1850 acted as a temporary solution, later in time it resulted in further severe problems as the Bleeding Kansas in 1854, where pro-slavery citizens and anti-slavery citizens quarrelsome produced a sort of small civil