Maine Statehood 1820

Maine had been trying to separate from Massachusetts for decades by the time it finally happened, and when it did, the occasion had almost nothing to do with Maine. What unlocked Maine's statehood in eighteen twenty was a political problem in Missouri.

Massachusetts had governed Maine as a district since sixteen fifty-two, more than a century and a half. Maine's residents had grown their own economy, their own identity, their own institutions. Multiple petitions for statehood had gone to Congress and stalled. The stalling was not about Maine. It was about the balance of free and slave states in the Senate. Admitting Maine as a free state would tip that balance unless a slave state came in at the same time.

Missouri was waiting. The Missouri Compromise, passed by Congress in March of eighteen twenty, admitted both: Maine as a free state on March fifteenth, Missouri as a slave state shortly after. The compromise also drew a line across the Louisiana Purchase territory at thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north latitude, above which slavery was to be prohibited in any future states carved from that territory. Maine's independence, in constitutional terms, was purchased at the cost of Missouri's slavery.

The line held for thirty-four years. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of eighteen fifty-four dissolved it, allowed the question of slavery in the territories to be decided by popular vote, and set the country on the path to civil war. The political architecture of the Missouri Compromise, built on the basis of Maine's statehood petition, collapsed within a generation of the state that started it being admitted to the union.