In the following year the Missouri question came up afresh, and Senator Thomas, of Illinois, proposed, as a compromise, that Missouri should be admitted to the Union with slavery, but that in all the remaining territory north of 36 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude, slavery should be forever prohibited. This amendment was adopted in the Senate by 24 to 20, and in the House by 90 to 87. Of the affirmative votes in the House only fourteen were from the North, and nearly all of these fourteen members became so unpopular at home that they lost their seats in the next election. The Missouri Compromise was generally considered a victory for the South, but one great Southerner considered it the death-knell of the Union. Thomas Jefferson was still living, at the age of seventy-seven. He saw what this sectional rift portended, and he wrote to John Holmes, one of his correspondents, under date of April 22, 1820:
This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened me and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated, and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.
Nearly all of the emancipationists, during the decade following the adoption of the Compromise, were in the slaveholding states, since the evil had its seat there. The Colonization Society's headquarters were in Washington City. Its president, Bushrod Washington, was a Virginian, and James Madison, Henry Clay, and John Randolph, leading Southerners, were its active supporters. The only newspaper devoted specially to the cause (the _Genius of Universal Emancipation_), edited by Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison, was published in the city of Baltimore. This paper was started in 1829, but it was short-lived. Mr. Garrison soon perceived that colonization, depending upon voluntary emancipation alone, would never bring slavery to an end, since emancipation was doubtful and sporadic, while the natural increase of slaves was certain and vastly greater than their possible deportation. For this reason he began to advocate emancipation without regard to colonization. This policy was so unpopular in Maryland and Virginia that his subscription list fell nearly to zero, and this compelled the discontinuance of the paper and his removal to another sphere of activity. He returned to his native state, Massachusetts, and there started another newspaper, entitled the _Liberator_, in 1831. The first anti-slavery crusade in the North thus had its beginning. It did not take the form of a political party. It was an agitation, an awakening of the public conscience. Its tocsin was immediate emancipation, as opposed to emancipation conditioned upon deportation.