Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 17.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

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The negro appears upon the scene.

When in 1820 Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a slave State, sectional interests and animosity again obtruded themselves into the counsels of the Union. The compatriots of Othello stalk upon the scene, and though of darker hue and utterly innocent of his crimes, they have served ever since as figure-heads upon party standards, as martyrs at whose shrine freedom must bow, as examples to ‘point a moral and adorn a tale’ not yet ended; for even to this day they seem to be an extremely uncomfortable element in the political counsels of their self-constituted champions, whose interests prompt them to value orthodoxy more than truth. A geographical line was fixed beyond which slavery could not go, and so by the ‘Missouri Compromise’ the dominant section of the Union appropriated to itself the lion's share of the very territory against the acquisition of which it had threatened secession in 1804.