April 9, 2026 - Ramblin' with Roger

I was heading to take the bus to attend my choir rehearsal one cold February evening. Even several dozen meters away, I could hear someone at my stop, saying, repeatedly, “Do you know about the Missouri Compromise? Remember the 14th Amendment!”

It turned out to be a young Black woman, maybe 22(?), who was chanting it, stopping for about ten seconds between recitations. The folks at our bus stop generally ignored her, but some at the stop across the street started yelling, “Shut up!” or a variant.

Since I had to walk past her, I ALMOST replied, “Yes, I do! The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Maine to enter the Union as a free state and Missouri to enter as a slave state. It set a precedent for the next 30 years or so. I even wrote a bit about it.” But I opted against. You can read how Henry Clay shepherded the bill here, and the bill’s wording here.

HCR

Then, on March 14, Heather Cox Richardson posted a piece titled “Happy Birthday, Maine.” You can access it on Substack here. In part, she wrote:

“Mainers were angry that their statehood had been tied to the demands of far-distant slave owners, and that anger worked its way into the state’s popular culture. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant that Maine men, who grew up steeped in that anger, could spread west.

And so they did.

“In 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had moved to Alton, Illinois, from Albion, Maine, to begin a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of human enslavement, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob, who threw his printing press into the Mississippi River.

“Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen, had also moved west from Maine. Owen saw Elijah shot and swore his allegiance to the cause of abolition. ‘I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother’s blood,’ he declared. He turned to politics, and in 1854, he was elected to the Illinois state legislature. His increasing prominence brought him political friends, including an up-and-coming lawyer who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky by way of Indiana, Abraham Lincoln…”

“Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, overturning the Missouri Compromise and permitting the spread of slavery to the West.” HCR wrote that the repercussions of that 1854 action included the creation of the Republican Party by 1856. When he ran for President in 1860, Lincoln picked Hannibal Hamlin of Maine to be his running mate.

So, the Missouri Compromise was the beginning of much anti-slavery fervor, which helped define the issue before the Civil War.

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Day: April 9, 2026

“The Missouri Compromise!”

HCR