The territory of Missouri is beyond our ancient limits, and the inquiry whether slavery shall exist there, is open to many of the arguments that might be employed, had slavery never existed within the United States. It is a question of no ordinary importance. Freedom and slavery are the parties which stand this day before the Senate; and upon its decision the empire of the one or the other will be established in the new State which we are about to admit into the Union.

If slavery be permitted in Missouri. . . what hope can be entertained that it will ever be prohibited in any of the new States that will be formed in the immense region west of the Mississippi? Will the coextensive establishment of slavery and of new States throughout this region, lessen the dangers of domestic insurrection, or of foreign aggression? Will this manner of executing the great trust of admitting new States into the Union, contribute to assimilate our manners and usages, to increase our mutual affection and confidence, and to establish that equality of benefits and burdens which constitutes the true basis of our strength and union? Will the militia of the nation, which must furnish our soldiers and seamen, increase as slaves increase? . . . There are limits within which our federal system must stop; no one has supposed that it could be indefinitely extended. We are now about to pass our original boundary; if this can be done without affecting the principles of our free governments, it can be accomplished only by the most vigilant Hezekiah Niles of Baltimore, in his Register of weekly events, December 23, 1820: "The people of those sections of the country in which there are few or no slaves or persons of color, very imperfectly appreciate the wants, necessities or general principles of others differently situated [that is, slave-holders]. Collectively the latter deprecate slavery as severely as the former, and dread its increase — but individual cupidity and rashness acts against the common sentiment, in the hope that an event which everybody believes must happen, may not happen in their day.... That the slave population will, at some certain period, cause the most horrible catastrophe, cannot be doubted those who possess them [slaves] act defensively in behalf of all that is nearest and dearest to them, when they endeavor to acquire all the strength and influence to meet that period which they can; and hence the political and civil opposition of these to the restriction which was proposed to be laid on Missouri." H. Niles, The Weekly Register, Vol. XIX, p. 265.

attention to plant, cherish, and sustain the principles of liberty in the new States that may be formed beyond our ancient limits.

...

Four days later William Pinkney of Maryland delivered a speech of three hours' length in reply to King:

Sir, it was but the other day that we were forbidden (properly forbidden, I am sure, for the prohibition came from you) to assume that there existed any intention to impose a prospective restraint on the domestic legislation of Missouri. . . . We are now, however, permitted to know that it is determined by a sort of political surgery to amputate one of the limbs of its local sovereignty, and thus mangled and disparaged, and thus only, to receive it into the bosom of the Constitution. It is now avowed that while Maine is to be ushered into the Union with every possible demonstration of studious reverence on our part . . this ill-conditioned upstart of the West, this obscure foundling of the wilderness, that was but yesterday the hunting ground of the savage, is to find her way into the American family as she can, with a humiliating badge of remediless inferiority patched upon her garments, . . . with a brand upon her forehead to tell the story of her territorial vassalage, and to perpetuate the memory of her evil propensities, . . . with the iron collar of servitude about her neck, instead of the civic crown of republican freedom upon her brows. . . .

I am told that you have the power to establish this odious and revolting distinction, and I am referred for the proofs of that power to various parts of the Constitution. . . . The clause of the Constitution which relates to the admission of new States is in these words :, "The Congress may admit new States into this Union" &c, and the advocates for restriction maintain that the use of the word may imports discretion to admit or reject; and that in this discretion is wrapped up another - that of prescribing the terms and conditions of admission in case you are willing to admit. Cuius est dare eius est disponere.1 . . .

1 "He who has the power to grant has also the power to make the terms of the grant."

I think I may assume that if such a power be anything but nominal, it is much more than adequate to the present object; that it is a power of vast expansion, to which human sagacity can assign no reasonable limits; that it is a capacious reservoir of authority, from which you may take, in all time to come, as occasion may serve, the means of oppression as well as of benefaction. . . . Sir, it is a wilderness of powers, of which fancy, in her happiest mood, is unable to perceive the far-distant and shadowy boundary. . . . By the aid of such a power, skilfully employed, you may "bridge your way" over the Hellespont that separates State legislation from that of Congress; and you may do so for pretty much the same purpose with which Xerxes once bridged his way across the Hellespont that separates Asia from Europe. He did so, in the language of Milton, "the liberties of Greece to yoke." You may do so for the analogous purpose of subjugating and reducing the sovereignties of States, as your taste or convenience may suggest, and fashioning them to your imperial will. . . .

"New States may be admitted by Congress into this Union." What is that Union? A confederation of States equal in sovereignty, capable of everything which the Constitution does not forbid or authorize Congress to forbid. . . . By acceding to it, the new State is placed on the same footing with the original States. It accedes for the same purpose, that is, protection of its unsurrendered sovereignty. If it comes in shorn of its beams - crippled and disparaged beyond the original States, it is not into the original Union that it comes. For it is a different sort of Union. The first Union was inter pares; this is a Union between disparates, between giants and a dwarf, between power and feebleness, between full proportioned sovereignties and a miserable image of power. . . . You cannot make the Union, as to the new State, what it is not as to the old; for then it is not this Union that you open for entrance of a new party. . . .

If I am told that, by the bill relative to Missouri, you do not legislate upon a new State, I answer that you do. . . . You legislate in the shape of terms and conditions prospectively; and you so legislate upon it that when it comes into the Union it is bound by a contract degrading and diminishing its

sovereignty. . . . Is the right to hold slaves a right which Massachusetts enjoys? If it is, Massachusetts is under this Union in a different character from Missouri. The compact of the union for it is different from the same compact of union for Missouri. . . . To admit or not is for you to decide. Admission once conceded, it follows as a corollary that you must take the new State as an equal companion with its fellows...

THE ABOLITIONISTS

from Liberia,

[316]

While statesmen were arguing in Congress on the right 73. A report of the central government to restrict the spread of slavery, 1828 and abolitionists were clamoring for immediate and uncompensated emancipation, a practical, but, as it proved, pitiably inadequate, attempt was being made to relieve the situation in the South by the transportation of free negroes and manumitted slaves to the colony of Liberia on the western coast of Africa. Following a suggestion made as early as 1781 by Thomas Jefferson,1 and repeatedly endorsed by state

1 In his Notes on Virginia (ed. 1787, pp. 228-229), Jefferson outlines some desirable changes in the Constitution of the State, among which are the following: "To emancipate all slaves born after passing the act . . . and further directing that they should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts, or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household, and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c., to declare them a free and independant people, and to extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength.... It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State?... Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

legislatures both North and South, the American Colonization Society was formed at Washington, early in 1817; and on March 3, 1819, President Monroe signed a bill which authorized him "to make such regulations and arrangements as he may deem expedient for the safe-keeping, support, and removal beyond the limits of the United States, of all such negroes, mulattoes, or persons of color as may be delivered and brought within their jurisdiction;1 and to appoint a proper person or persons residing on the coast of Africa as agent or agents for receiving the negroes. ..." An appropriation of $100,000 was made for carrying out the act of Congress. With the aid of the Colonization Society, the ship Elizabeth was chartered and a company of eighty-six negroes from various states embarked for Africa in the brave attempt to turn the tide of negro migration, which for two hundred years had flowed to the shores of the western world. The Elizabeth sailed from New York harbor on the 6th of February, 1820, five days before John Quincy Adams "went up to the Capitol and heard Mr. King" on the Missouri question. After two discouraging years of danger and disease, which read like the early history of Jamestown or Plymouth, the little colony was established. As a political experiment of self-government among a small population of picked negroes the

1 This refers to "recaptured Africans," or negroes confiscated by the government for being illegally landed at Southern ports. The act of 1807 had imposed fines of $20,000 for equipping a slave vessel, $5000 for transporting negroes to the United States to be sold as slaves, and $800 for purchasing any such negro as a slave. Still many slaves were imported, and often sold under conditions making it profitable for the owner to have landed them and paid the fine. The student will gain some idea of why the Southerner was willing to support almost any scheme for the removal of the free negroes, by reading the exciting story of Denmark Vesey in the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VII, pp. 728-744.