nt in national legislation
New England traced her misfortunes. She was opposed to the War of 1812,
but was overruled to her hurt by the South. In these circumstances New
England went for correcting the inequalities of the original basis of
the Union, which gave to the South its undue preponderance in shaping
national laws and policies. This was the purpose of the Hartford
Convention, which proposed the abrogation of the slave representation
clause of the Constitution, and the imposition of a check upon the
admission of new States into the Union. The second proposition did not
say "new slave States," but new slave States was, nevertheless, intended
by the Convention. Here in point of time and magnitude, was the first
distinct collision of the two sets of ideas and interests of the
Republic.

Following the Treaty of Ghent other and imperious questions engaged the
public attention--questions of the tariff, of finance, internal
improvements, national defence, a new navy, forts and fortifications.
Hard times, too, engrossed an enormous share of this attention. The
immediate needs and problems of the hour pushed into the background all
less pressing ones. The slavery question amidst the clamor and babel of
emergent and material interests, lost something of its sectional heat
and character. But its fires were not extinguished, only banked as
events were speedily to reveal.

The application of Missouri for admission into the Union as a slave
State four years after the Hartford Convention blew to a blaze the
covered embers of strife between the sections. The North was violently
agitated. For the admission of a new slave State meant two more slave
votes in the Senate, and an increase on the old inequitable basis of
slave representation in the lower House of Congress. It meant to the
Northern section indefinite Southern ascendency, prolonged Southern lead
in national legislation. All the smouldering passions of the earlier
period, of embargo, and non-intercourse, and the war of 1812, flamed
suddenly and fiercely in the heart of the free States.

The length and bitterness of that controversy excited the gravest
apprehensions for the stability of the Union. The dread of disunion led
to mutual concessions, to the Missouri Compromise. The slave-holding
section got its immediate claim allowed, and the free States secured the
erection of a line to the north of which slavery was forever prohibited.
And besides this, the admission of M