The Federal Government Forces Missouri to Pay for Things it Needs
- This might come as a shocker, but states don't like paying for things.
- This early in U.S. history, the problem was even more exaggerated: sources of revenue were decidedly thin. There was no tax on income, so the majority of state revenue came from sale of land or tariffs and duties.
- Since this could be kinda unreliable, states were always looking for some way to cut costs or sneak in more fines or duties in order to generate more revenue.
- Bearing in mind the demographics of most elected officials at the time (rich older white dudes) this also translated to a great potential for certain necessary functions of the state to fall through the cracks. Congress was wise to this game, so they put in a number of mandated distributions of funding.
- The first mandate stipulates that a certain space of every township has to be set aside for a school. Education in early U.S. history was notoriously unreliable and appallingly bad, mostly because of the lack of $$$ mentioned earlier. Congress was aware of the problem, and so made Missouri's acceptance into the Union contingent upon getting some schools going, stat.
- The second issue covered by Section 6 is water rights. This was an incredibly touchy issue (and continued to be: take a peek at Chinatown) as the distribution of natural resources was uneven, and a little H2O served as one of the primary measures of value of any given plot of land.
- Congress conferred ownership of all salt springs to the state, provided they weren't already owned by somebody. A bit of an issue here is that no mechanism was provided to determine ownership, so the state could certainly fudge things and there wasn't a thing some poor farmer could do about it.
- So Congress regulated the sale and lease of such springs, so that any sale or lease beyond ten years need Congressional approval.
- Third, Congress set aside a portion of the state's income for the construction and maintenance of roads and canals. This number was set at five percent of all land sales, with sixty percent of the money being set aside for construction and forty percent for maintenance. (We know, guys: this isn't the most thrilling stuff in the world, but it is in the Missouri Compromise.)
- Fourth, the Compromise allots a piece of land for the purposes of a seat of governance. Where this might be was left up to Missouri, but as always, there were rules: the space provided was set at four "sections," and Congress didn't want any funny business in the way their placement was chosen.
- So the Compromise mandates that these four sections must be together. Also, though the convention could select whatever land they saw as best fit for the purposes of a state capital, it couldn't choose land that had already been sold to the public: they couldn't sell the land and then reappropriate it for the purposes of a capitol. Nice try, sneaky Missourians.
- The last issue managed by Congress was one of land. That and a weirdly inserted mandate for spaces set aside for a number of "seminaries of learning". These were, effectively, institutions of higher learning. Not exactly universities, but hey: it was what the U.S. had at the time. Attached to this was a number of stipulations about the sale of—you guessed it—land.
- Basically what Congress was ensuring was the power of the Federal government. The Federal government wasn't about to hand over its supreme authority over the land, not only to maintain its own power but because this was their primary source of revenue.