Such was the situation when the application of Missouri for
admission as a state in 1819 presented to Congress the whole
question of slavery beyond the Mississippi, where freedom and
slavery had found a new fighting-ground. East of the Mississippi the
Ohio was a natural dividing-line; farther west there appeared no
obvious boundary between slavery and freedom. By a natural process
of selection, the valleys of the western tributaries of the
Mississippi, as far north as the Arkansas and Missouri, in which
slaves had been allowed while it was a part of French and Spanish
Louisiana (no restraints having been imposed by Congress), received
an increasing proportion of the slave-holding planters. It would, in
the ordinary course of events, become the area of slave states.
The struggle began in the House of Representatives, when the
application of Missouri for statehood was met by an amendment,
introduced by Tallmadge of New York, February 13, 1819, [Footnote:
Annals of Cong., 15 Cong., 2 Sess.
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