. A history of the United States of America, its people, and its institutions. o pre- ^\ serve that equality. The admission ofMaine would give a preponderance tothe free States. It was therefore desiredby Southern members that Missourishould be admitted as a slave was opposed by many Northernmembers, who stronsrly obiected to the . , ^ -^ ^ HBaJBY CLAY. extension of slavery. The debate over this question was long and bitter. Itwas ended in 1820 by a bill introduced by Jesse B. Thomas,of Ilhnois, and strongly advocated by Henry Clay,^ the ^ Henry Clay was born in Virginia in 1777. He
. A history of the United States of America, its people, and its institutions. o pre- ^\ serve that equality. The admission ofMaine would give a preponderance tothe free States. It was therefore desiredby Southern members that Missourishould be admitted as a slave was opposed by many Northernmembers, who stronsrly obiected to the . , ^ -^ ^ HBaJBY CLAY. extension of slavery. The debate over this question was long and bitter. Itwas ended in 1820 by a bill introduced by Jesse B. Thomas,of Ilhnois, and strongly advocated by Henry Clay,^ the ^ Henry Clay was born in Virginia in 1777. He entered the Ken-tucky legislature in 1803, and was elected in 1806 to the House ofRepresentatives, whose Speaker he became in 1811. He was at thattime the leader of the war party, and was in later years distinguishedas the advocate of several useful compromise measures. He servedas Secretary of State under President John Quincy Adams, became amember of the Senate, and was three times an unsuccessful candidatefor the Presidency. He became the leader of the Whig party on its. 292 THIRTY YEARS OF PEACE AND PROGRESS. Speaker of the This bill proposed that Missourishould be admitted as a slave State, but that slavery shouldforever be prohibited in any other part of the Western ter-ritory of the United States that lay north of the parallel of36° 30. Such was the character of the famous MissouriCompromise. It divided the country into a free North anda slave-holding South, and ^or the next thirty years re-moved this question out of politics. Maine, whose admis-sion had been resisted, became a State March 15, was admitted August 10, 1821. Public Improvements.—The Cumberland Road, a na-tional highway to the West begun in 1806, had beenextended from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling. Itwas now proposed to carry it to the Mississippi. It wasgradually extended into Ohio, stretching farther and fartherwest, until in the end it was carried to the Mississippi byaid of
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