ADMISSION OF MISSOURI



souri was admitted conditionally, and, on August 10, the
President proclaimed its admission as the twenty-fourth State
amid a tempest of political excitement. The contest over the
slavery question was now supposed to be forever settled.
   In the debates of 1821 the House stood firmly against
Missouri's admission as a slave State, and the Senate was
equally determined that the colored citizens of other States
should be denied citizenship in Missouri if the people so
desired. At last a conference committee decided that Mis-
souri should be admitted, as soon as its Legislature would
agree that the section of the Constitution in question should
not be construed as authorizing a law excluding any citizens
of other States from the immunities and privileges to which
they were entitled under the Constitution. The Legislature
gave this pledge, but it remained open whether free negroes
and mulattoes were citizens in other States, and whether they
were to be made citizens in Missouri. In the admission of
Missouri there was for the first time an unmixed issue on the
question of a free government or a slave-holding government
in the United States. Doubtful dealings on the part of the
Senators from Indiana and Illinois were followed by an at-
tempt to make these States both slave-holding States, in face
of the binding law of the Ordinance of 1787. A popular
movement led by Governor Edward Coles of Illinois defeated
this project.
   On May 5 the territory of Liberia was secured on the west
coast of Africa, and a colony was founded for the repatria-
tion of negro slaves, with Monrovia for a capital. During
this same period Junius Brutus Booth made his first appear-
ance in America, as Richard III, at Richmond. Late in the
year the remains of Andr6, the British officer who was shot
as a spy during the American Revolution, were placed on a
British ship for interment in Westminster Abbey.



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1821