Hey everyone, thanks for downloading the third episode of our Civil War podcast. I'm

Rich and I'm Tracy. Hello y'all, welcome to the podcast. Previously on the podcast, we started to

show how the issue of slavery and the question of its expansion in a new territory had played a major

role in shaping and defining the American political landscape, even from the earliest days of our

country's history. We ended the last episode in the year 1819 with Missouri's petition to join

the Union as a slave state and why that set off alarm bells in the North. And so we want to start

this show by returning to that point and talking about the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As we said before,

Missouri's petition to join the Union as a slave state set off alarm bells in the North for a

couple of reasons. Reason the first, it would have set the political balance of power and Congress

between the country's 11 slave states and 11 free states. Reason the second, if Missouri were to

become the country's northernmost slave state, it would seem to disregard the precedent set by the

Northwest ordinance, which banned slavery in the lands that lay north of the line of the Ohio River.

And so for those reasons, many northern congressmen thought it was time to take a stand against the

expansion of slavery. In an attempt to defuse the growing crisis and strike a compromise of sorts,

in 1819, a congressman from New York named James Talmadge tried to add an anti-slavery amendment

to the Missouri statehood bill. While conceding the admission of Missouri as a slave state,

the Talmadge amendment stipulated that slavery was then to be phased out of the state over the next

generation. Talmadge's proposal absolutely impuriated the southern congressional delegations.

Representative Thomas W. Cobb of Georgia declared that the amendment contained, quote,

a fexed destructive of the peace and harmony of the Union. End quote.

Well, despite the protests of their southern colleagues, the large northern majority in the House

representatives accepted the amendment, but in the Senate where slave and free states were

...