Whereas: Stories from the People’s House

“Here will I hold my stand”: James Tallmadge Jr. and the Fight to Stop the Spread of Slavery

On February 13, 1819, Representative James Tallmadge Jr., a first-term Republican from New York, offered a pair of antislavery amendments to a Missouri statehood bill that shaped the course of American history. One amendment outlawed “the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude” into Missouri; the other created a timetable for gradual emancipation that freed every enslaved person born in the territory at the age of 25.

Tallmadge’s legislation was, in large measure, the first serious time since 1787—when slavery was outlawed in the Northwest Territory surrounding the Great Lakes—that federal lawmakers were forced to define Congress’s power to regulate the spread of slavery. Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Congress had largely dodged the issue as it outlined policies governing the new territory west of the Mississippi River, including the region that would become Missouri. But in 1819, Tallmadge’s efforts compelled the House to determine whether slavery would be allowed to expand westward—exposing fault lines on Capitol Hill that quickly calcified and defined the next 40 years of legislative stasis on the issue.

Three days after introducing his amendments, Tallmadge delivered a defiant speech on the House Floor in which he argued that the Constitution empowered Congress to stop the expansion of slavery. Members may have been caught off guard by Tallmadge’s timing, but no one should have been surprised that Tallmadge offered the antislavery package. Twenty years earlier, in 1798, Tallmadge gave a similar speech at his college graduation in which he excoriated slavery and invoked the Declaration of Independence in his call for universal emancipation.

As a young man, Tallmadge challenged policymakers to uphold the principles of equality in the Declaration and make real a world devoid of slavery. Two decades later, when Tallmadge was one of those policymakers, he turned away from the idealism of his youth and toward the legal might of the Constitution to limit slavery’s spread.

“Liberty was the birth right”

James Tallmadge Jr. was born on January 28, 1778, in Stanfordville, New York, about 10 miles from the Connecticut border and a day’s ride from the nearest major port on the Hudson River. He was a child of the American Revolution—the Declaration of Independence had been drafted just 18 months before he was born—and he came of age alongside America’s fledgling experiment in self-government.

That Tallmadge would later offer legislation outlawing slavery in Missouri would have hardly come as a shock to anyone who heard him speak as a young man. Tallmadge attended the College of Rhode Island, what is today Brown University. On the day he graduated, September 5, 1798, Tallmadge delivered a long speech at his commencement ceremony titled “An oration upon the Infringement of the rights of man,” in which he condemned the slave trade and warned that America would fail if slavery was allowed to continue.

For most of his young life, the 20-year-old Tallmadge had watched from across the Atlantic as wars and civil violence engulfed Europe. Tallmadge warned that “similar calamities appear to portend America” if it continued to condone “the prosecution of the slave trade . . . an unjust and & inhuman traffic of human beings.” (The emphasis on slave trade and human beings was Tallmadge’s in his written remarks.)

Tallmadge reminded his audience that the Declaration of Independence, the founding document that animated the early antislavery movement, “admitted that Man was free & independent; that all men were blessed with equal rights and privileges, and that liberty was the birth right, the Palladium of every individual.” And yet, he said, the United States denied those truths to the men, women, and children violently stolen from their homes in Africa and brought to America. Tallmadge called on his audience to reject slavery’s imagined racial hierarchy. “Should a theory like this be admitted as general, mankind would be at once resolved into a universal monarchy, with some weak puny white-faced creature for their sovereign, and those whose colour was fartherest removed from white though a Newton or a Franklin, an Adams or a Washington would be reduced to most abject slavery.”

Ironically, Tallmadge’s education had been made possible by the very institution he loathed: slave traders had endowed and sustained the College of Rhode Island, and enslaved laborers built the college’s oldest building. To what degree Tallmadge was aware of this fact remains unclear. But in his remarks he called for harsh penalties for those engaged in the slave trade. “If capital punishment is inflicted upon the villain who attacks or robs a man of his property upon the high way, what punishment can be devised sufficiently great for those who traverse the wide Atlantic and spread death & desolation on the African Shore, who not only rob its unoffending possessors of their property, but of their liberty and lives and chain them down in ignominious servitude.”

During his speech, Tallmadge exposed his own biases about the world’s societies even as he underscored the hypocrisy of the slave trade. The raids along the African seaboard, he said, were led “by men who were born in a civilized Country” and that “these well armed men from a christian country, impelled by avarice are seen combatting with rude unarmed barbarians.”

Tallmadge closed by calling for universal emancipation. “Then will our present slaves be permitted to enjoy the sacred rights of man. Then will they have a country to love and defend, and when danger threatens then they with all true Americans firmly united with their Adams in their cabanet [sic] and their Washington in the field clasping the standard of liberty will swear to live free & independent or gloriously expire in its ruins.”

Twenty years later, as a U.S. Representative, Tallmadge returned to the image of America in ruins, a country crushed by the weight of slavery.

“Now is the time”

In the years between college and Congress, Tallmadge worked as an aide to the once and future New York Governor George Clinton. Tallmadge practiced law in Poughkeepsie and New York City, and during the War of 1812 he led a group of “home guards” defending his state.

In 1817, following the death of Member-elect Henry B. Lee, Tallmadge won a special election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the 15th Congress (1817–1819). Although he declined to stand for re-election, the stubbornly independent Tallmadge left an oversized mark on Congress during his one term. Early in the 15th Congress, Tallmadge met with Senator Rufus King of New York, a Federalist, about limiting or reversing the electoral benefit slaveholding states received from the Constitution’s provision that treated enslaved men and women as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning seats in Congress. Tallmadge then later objected to Illinois’s statehood bill because he considered its antislavery provisions far too weak.

By February 1819, Tallmadge and his New York colleague (and future Speaker of the House) John W. Taylor had settled on an antislavery solution for Missouri statehood. Years later, Taylor left an account about the amendments’ origin. Taylor recalled chatting with Tallmadge about Missouri’s proximity to the old Northwest Territory where slavery had been outlawed in 1787. Taylor and Tallmadge decided to propose extending the Northwest Ordinance across the Mississippi River to Missouri and the rest of the Louisiana Territory with “the hope that our brethren of the South, like their predecessors of 1787, would cheerfully cooperate.”

Tallmadge’s amendments came at a moment when the politics of slavery began to harden the divisions between the North and South. In the North, new wage labor industries had emerged alongside the shipping and farming sectors; antislavery politicians held numerous offices; and slavery, where it continued to exist, was being eliminated—two years earlier, for instance, Tallmadge had spearheaded gradual emancipation legislation in New York. The South, meanwhile, had built its entire society around slavery, and voters elected lawmakers who protected the interests of white slaveholders. As a result, the fate of the western territories became fiercely contested on Capitol Hill. Around 10,000 enslaved people already lived in Missouri. Would Congress continue to allow slavery to expand west of the Mississippi River? Or would legislators outlaw it?

When debate opened on Tallmadge’s antislavery amendments in mid-February 1819, southern Members erupted in indignant disbelief. Southerners threatened disunion and proclaimed that there was not enough water on Earth to douse the “fire” of sectional grievance sparked by the legislation.

“If a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so!” Tallmadge replied on the House Floor. “If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!” His personal convictions notwithstanding, Tallmadge told the House he was simply representing the will of his constituents and “their hatred to slavery in every shape; as their representative, here will I hold my stand, until this floor, with the Constitution of my country which supports it, shall sink beneath me. If I am doomed to fall, I shall at least have the painful consolation to believe that I fall, as a fragment, in the ruins of my country.”

Tallmadge offered a lengthy defense of his bill, but acknowledged that it did nothing about slavery where it already existed—a concession, he admitted, to Members from slaveholding states who told him widespread abolition would lead to a “servile war” and endanger “the safety of the white population.” In a far cry from the militant rhetoric of his youth, Tallmadge said he would “willingly . . . submit to an evil which we cannot safely remedy.”

But whatever reservations Congress had about confronting slavery in South Carolina or Alabama “cease when we cross the banks of the Mississippi,” Tallmadge argued. Stopping the spread of slavery into the territories was the first step in eradicating it for good. But it was not a guaranteed step, and Tallmadge implored Congress to blockade slavery and its political power while it had the chance. “Now is the time,” he declared. “It must now be met, and the extension of the evil must now be prevented, or the occasion is irrecoverably lost, and the evil can never be contracted.”

Tallmadge’s argument for his legislation followed a basic logic. Tallmadge said that Article IV, Section 3 of Constitution gave Congress control over America’s territories, meaning that Congress could also make Missouri’s admission to the Union contingent on the abolition of slavery. The House had already approved amendments to the Missouri statehood bill governing river navigation and property taxes. Tallmadge asked how his antislavery amendments were any different. “The Constitution applies equally to all, or to none,” he said.

Tallmadge also cited congressional precedent, reminding the House that “the admission of a State into the Union is a legislative act.” The Missouri Territory was part of the original Louisiana Purchase, which the federal government acquired from France in 1803. When Congress created other states out of federal land it always “prevented the extension of slavery,” Tallmadge said. Kentucky and Tennessee may have been admitted to the Union as slaveholding states, but they were formed from “lands” in existing states which “were never owned by the United States.”

Tallmadge concluded his speech by proclaiming his faith in the House’s capacity to correct past injustices. “I shall bow in silence to the will of the majority.” But, he continued, “I confidently hope that majority will be found on the side of an amendment, so replete with moral consequences, so pregnant with important political results.” Following Tallmadge’s remarks, the House approved both of his antislavery amendments to the Missouri statehood bill.

With only days left in the session, however, the House and Senate failed to reach an agreement on Missouri’s statehood before the close of the 15th Congress and the end of Tallmadge’s time on Capitol Hill. The Missouri crisis carried over to the 16th Congress (1819–1821), which Tallmadge watched from afar. At one point, he wrote to Taylor, “The Missouri Bill . . . is our child—& with me a Darling favourite—But I fear an ill fated offspring.”

“An ill fated offspring”

Tallmadge was right. A year later, Congress agreed to the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which admitted Missouri as a slave state but outlawed slavery north of an imaginary line that ran westward from the Mississippi River at a latitude roughly equal to the northern border of what is today the state of Arkansas.

After leaving the House, Tallmadge served briefly in the New York legislature before a stint as lieutenant governor from 1824 to 1826. He died in 1853, less than a year before Congress repealed the Missouri Compromise and replaced it with the Kansas–Nebraska Act. On paper, the new law enabled western territories to determine whether to allow slavery by popular sovereignty. In practice, however, it led to years of bloody violence between antislavery and proslavery forces.

In 1798 and again in 1819, Tallmadge had warned that if America failed to eradicate slavery, civil war would be inevitable. The decision by 11 southern states to secede following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 proved Tallmadge right once again.

Sources: Annals of Congress, House, 15th Cong., 2nd sess. (13 February 1819): 1166; Annals of Congress, House, 15th Cong., 2nd sess. (16 February 1819): 1203–1216; James Tallmadge Jr., “An oration upon the Infringement of the rights of man,” 5 September 1798, Brown Digital Repository, Brown University, https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:303636/; New-York Daily Tribune, 29 May 1847; Daily National Intelligencer, 3 October 1853; George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United State Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Glover Moore, The Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 (Louisville, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1966); Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); John R. Van Atta, Wolf by the Ears: The Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, Slavery and Justice (2006), http://brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/report/index.html.

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