(5) Tree Line

The Missouri Compromise is a difficult text because the way it was drafted specifically not to address slavery as the central issue at hand. The guys who wrote this doc were super keen not to mention the (morally abhorrent) elephant in the room.

So the wording is basically wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak—it discusses how many representatives can come from various areas, what rights and privileges certain regions might have, and lengthy descriptions of borders to establish these regions into coherent states.

In other words, it sounds dry as a Missouri creekbed in August. But when you read a little more closely, the Missouri Compromise becomes a masterwork of skirting the issue.

Everybody knew what they were doing with all this illusive wording—the issue of slavery was an asterisk that hung over any new state.

Oh yeah: it doesn't help that in a document of nearly two thousand words, there are fewer than forty sentences.