free schools. With these prosaic associations no colonial traditions, royal grants, or conflicting State claims interfered. It was a new world; a fresh experience; a precedent for posterity. The vastness of the public domain made generosity an easy virtue with the government, and land could be had almost for the asking.

It followed that the new States and the old viewed the government in quite different lights. The old Thirteen looked upon the Union as their creation; the new States looked upon it as their creator. They began with the Union, but the older States thought that the Union began with them. Old and new alike thought of the Union as a compact-as a government of specified, delegated powers. To this degree of unanimity all the States had attained-from Maine to Missouri, from Michigan to Florida. The doctrine of '98 was held by the majority of people who gave the question any thought. It was both the legal and the historical view. Equality was a well-worn word in 1830, but the century was to reach its close before politicians and parties and newspapers and preachers and teachers and writers in America were to be talking and thinking and demanding economic equality. As yet, political equality was conceived to be the rightful remedy for all social ills.

CHAPTER X

FEDERAL RELATIONS-MISSOURI

By the treaty of 1803 the United States* agreed to protect the inhabitants of the Louisiana country in the enjoyment of their liberty, religion, and property. The country was slave soil. Slaves were property, and by the treaty this property was under the protection of the United States. The protection was not conditioned upon the amount or the value of the property. The owner of a single slave was as much the object of the treaty as if the entire acquisition had been filled with a slave-holding population. When Louisiana was admitted, the guarantee of the treaty, the

* The principal authorities for this chapter are the Annals of Congress, 1819-21-i.e., the fifteenth Congress, second session, to the close of the second session of the sixteenth Congress. This chapter was written several years before the publication of Professor James A. Woodburn's article on The Historical Significance of the Missouri Compromise, in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1893, pp. 251-297. Washington: Government Printing-office, 1894. In revising my chapter I have been glad to be confirmed, in several particulars, by Professor Woodburn's able paper.

† Art. iii. The treaty may be found in Treaties and Conventions, etc., pp. 331-334; the convention for the purchase-money, pp. 334, 335; for the payment of debts assumed by the United States, pp. 335-342.

wishes of the inhabitants, and the will of Congress made it a slave State. There were at the time, exclusive of the Indian tribes, about one hundred thousand people in the Louisiana country-threefourths of whom were in the new State, and nearly all of the remainder within the present bounds of Missouri.

Ten years passed. Arkansas had nearly fifteen thousand population and Missouri nearly seventy thousand. In Missouri, at this time, there were ten thousand slaves; in Arkansas about sixteen hundred. The treaty further provided for the admission of new States that might be formed out of the purchase-on an equal footing with the original States. The petition of Missouri for admission was presented to the House on the 16th of March, 1818, by Scott, its delegate, as chairman of the select committee to which this and several petitions of a similar nature were referred. He reported a bill on the 18th of April, empowering the people of the Territory to form a constitution, a State government, and to be admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the other States. The bill was read twice and referred to the Committee of the Whole, but received no further attention at this session.

At the second session, Henry Clay, the Speaker, on the 18th of December, laid before the House a recent memorial of the Missouri Legislature praying for admission; but not until the 13th of February following did the question come up, when, in Committee of the Whole, the House began the

Restricting the Spread of Slavery

discussion of the enabling acts for Alabama and Missouri. As reported, these were in the form hitherto usual in the admission of a State-that the constitution of the new commonwealth be republican in form and not inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States. The act for Missouri was first considered, and, on the second day, Tallmadge, of New York, offered an amendment embodying two restrictions-that the further introduction of slavery, except as a punishment for crime, be prohibited, and that all children born within the State should be free, but might be held to service until the age of twenty-five years. The purpose of the second restriction was gradual emancipation-after the precedent of most of the Northern States. The first restriction was taken from the Ordinance of 1787. The restrictions, it was said, were both right and expedient. On the other hand, it was argued that Congress had no power to prescribe the details of a State government other than that it must be republican in form. Of what value a restriction? Once admitted, a State had the unquestioned right to change its constitution. But, replied the friends of the restriction, Congress has a clear and comprehensive grant of power in the constitutional provision authorizing it "to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the Territory or other property belonging to the United States." Thus, in exercise of this power, Congress, in the enabling acts for Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, had made their admission to the Union.

conditional upon their constitutions not being repugnant to the Ordinance of 1787. Missouri lay in the same latitude. Why should not the same principles of government be applied? Very true, answered the opposition, if Congress were not restrained by the treaty of 1803. The obligation rests on Congress to protect the property of the inhabitants of the late French territory; therefore no restriction can be placed on slavery. Not so, said the supporters of the amendment. The treaty contained not one word about erecting the new country into States. Who make treaties? The President and the Senate. Would any man claim that they had power to bind Congress to admit new States into the Union? Then the President and the Senate could change the Constitution and rob Congress of one of its expressly delegated powers. Clearly the treaty could not affect the question, and, in truth, the erection of the Territories of Louisiana and Orleans, and the admission of the first as a State, proved this. Congress had then annexed conditions: the civil law had to give place, in large measure, to the common law; trial by jury was introduced; and the language of the inhabitants-chiefly Spanish and French-was not allowed to remain supreme; legislative and judicial proceedings were required to be conducted in English. Congress was, therefore, sovereign with respect to the Territories. Missouri was bought for money, and might be sold for money. How irrational, then, to claim that though Congress had