<P> Tallmadge had to back from a fellow New York Republican, Congressman John W. Taylor (not to be confused with legislator John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia). Taylor also had antislavery credentials: In February 1819, he had proposed similar slave restrictions on Arkansas territory in the House, but failed 89 - 87 . He would lead the pro-Tallmadge antislavery forces during the 16th Congress in 1820 . </P> <P> The amendment instantly exposed the polarization among Jeffersonian Republicans over the future of slavery in the nation . Northern Jeffersonian Republicans formed a coalition across factional lines with remnants of the Federalists . Southern Jeffersonian united in almost unanimous opposition . The ensuing debates pitted the northern "restrictionists" (antislavery legislators who wished to bar slavery from the Louisiana territories) and southern "anti-restrictionists" (proslavery legislators who rejected any interference by Congress inhibiting slavery expansion). </P> <P> The sectional "rupture" over slavery among Jeffersonian Republicans, first exposed in the Missouri crisis, had its roots in the Revolutionary generation . </P> <P> Five Congressmen in Maine were opposed to spreading slavery into new territories . Dr. Brian Purnell, professor of Africana Studies and U.S. history at Bowdoin College, writes in Portland Magazine, "Martin Kinsley, Joshua Cushman, Ezekiel Whitman, Enoch Lincoln, and James Parker--wanted to prohibit slavery's spread into new territories . In 1820, they voted against the Missouri Compromise and against Maine's independence . In their defense, they wrote that, if the North, and the nation, embarked upon this Compromise--and ignored what experiences proved, namely that southern slave holders were determined to dominate the nation through ironclad unity and perpetual pressure to demand more land, and more slaves--then these five Mainers declared Americans "shall deserve to be considered a besotted and stupid race, fit, only, to be led blindfold; and worthy, only, to be treated with sovereign contempt ." </P>

Who engineered a way to get the terms of the compromise of 1850 passed