The roots of the Civil War planted themselves far before the secession of the South from the Union. In 1787, during the writing of the Constitution, Roger Sherman proposed a compromise known as “The Great Compromise”. This compromise included a clause called the “Three-Fifths Compromise”, which created a method to account for the population of slaves when deciding the number of representatives in the House of Representatives. The Constitution states that the number of …show more content…
The nation created several compromises to create peace, beginning with the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Congress created the Missouri Compromise to ensure that the United States had an equal amount of free and slave states comprising it, so that Congress would remain balanced. This compromise allows Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, while also adding Maine to the Union as a free state to maintain balance. However, this compromise also states that any state north of the Mason-Dixon line, “contemplated by this act, slavery and involuntary servitude, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the parties shall have been duly convicted, shall be, and is hereby, forever prohibited”. This compromise effectively divides the country by geography, and it indirectly splits people into a