A History of the American People

as a slave state, thus keeping the balance in the Senate 26-26. This was agreed on March 2, 1820
by a narrow vote in the House. But a further crisis arose when the proslavery majority in
Missouri's constitutional convention insisted it contain a clause prohibiting free blacks and
mulattos from settling in the new state. This infringed Article IV, Section 2, of the Constitution
of the United States: The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the Several States.' Free blacks were citizens of a number of states, including slave states like North Carolina and Tennessee-indeed they even voted there until taken off the rolls in the 1830s. Might the row over slavery in Missouri have led to a breakdown in the Union? Some people thought it could. Jefferson wrote to a friend:This momentous question, like a firebell in the
night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.'
There had been some in New England who wanted secession over the War of 1812. Would the
South now secede over the refusal of the North to agree to the extension of slavery? John Quincy
Adams, now Secretary of State, thought this the logical and even the moral solution. Adams did
not see how North and South could continue to live together. He noted grimly in his diaries in
March 1820 a conversation he had had with his Cabinet colleague, Calhoun (then War
Secretary). Calhoun told him that in his state, South Carolina, domestic labor was confined to the blacks and such was the prejudice that if he, who was the most popular man in the district, were to keep a white servant in his house, his character and reputation would be irretrievably ruined ... It did not apply to all kinds of labor-not for example to farming. Manufacturing and mechanical labor was not degrading. It was only manual labor, the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. And it was the best guarantee of equality among the whites.' Adams commented savagely on Calhoun's admissions:In the abstract, [Southerners] say that
slavery is an evil. But when probed to the quick on it they show at the bottom their soul's pride
and vainglory in their condition of masterdom.'
Adams' moral condemnation of the South ignored the fact that, throughout the North,
discrimination against blacks was universal and often enshrined in statutes. In Pennsylvania, for
instance, special measures were taken to guard against black crime, the governor of the state
insisting that blacks had a peculiar propensity to commit assaults, robberies, and burglaries. Both
Ohio and Indiana had a legal requirement that, on entering the state, a black must post a bond for
$500 as a guarantee of good behavior. In 18 21 New York State's constitutional convention
virtually adopted manhood suffrage: anyone who possessed a freehold, paid taxes, had served in
the state militia, or had even worked on the state highways could vote-but only if he was white.' It actually increased the property qualification for blacks from $l00 to $250. Pennsylvania also adopted manhood suffrage in 1838, but on awhites only' basis. Anti-black color bars were usual
in trade unions, especially craft ones. Adams was well aware that in Europe the North's color
bars already shocked educated people. When he was minister in St Petersburg, nobles who were
quite happy to beat one of their serfs to death with the knout looked down on Americans as
uncivilized because of their treatment of blacks-a foretaste of 20th-century anti-Americanism. He
noted (August 5, 1812): After dinner I had a visit from Claud Gabriel the black man in the Emperor [Alexander I]'s service, who went to America last summer with his wife and children, and who is now come back [to St Petersburg] with them. He complained of having been very ill- treated in America, and that he was obliged to lay aside his superb dress and saber, which he had been ordered to wear, but which occasioned people to insult and beat him.' It was already known forreactionary' European regimes to pay honors to American blacks as a way of demonstrating
the hypocrisy of American egalitarianism.