Timothy Claimright | Maine Not to Be Coupled with the Missouri Question, 1820

If the South will not yield, to the West be it known,

That Maine will declare for a King of her own;

And three hundred thousand of freemen demand

The justice bestow’d on each State in the land.

Free whites of the East are not blacks of the West,

And Republican souls on this principle rest,

That if no respect to their rights can be shown,

They know how to vindicate what are their own. . . .

They are founded on freedom, humanity’s right,

Ordained by God against slavery to fight.

And Heaven born liberty sooner than yield,

The whites of Missouri shall dress their own field.

We are hardy and healthy, can till our own soil,

In labour delight; make a pleasure of toil. . . .

They too lazy to work, drive slaves, whom they fear;

We school our own children, and brew our own beer.

We do a day’s work and go fearless to bed;

Tho’ lock’d up, they dream of slaves, whom they dread. . . .

They may boast of their blacks; we boast of our plenty,

And swear to be free, eighteen hundred and twenty. . . .

A Sister in Union admit her, as free;

To be coupled with slaves, she will never agree.

Source: Timothy Claimright, Maine Not to Be Coupled with the Missouri Question (Brunswick, ME, 1820), Library of Congress Ephemera Collection.

Thomas Jefferson | Letter to John Holmes, 1820

Monticello, April 22, 1820

I thank you, dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark [ship] to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened 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. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property [slavery], for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle [an insignificant thing] which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

Source: Thomas Jefferson Randolph, ed., Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1829), 4:332.