there was no law on the subject. Upon the matter being brought to the attention of Congress by the Governor of Pennsylvania, a Fugitive Slave Law and also an Extradiiton Law for fugitives from justice were enacted. While the fugitive from justice was surrounded by the safeguards of a requisition accompanied by a certified copy of an indictment or affidavit charging the crime, these safeguards were not given to the slave, but he could be forcibly seized by the owner or his agent and taken before a magistrate. There was no trial by jury, and the only requisite for conviction was an affidavit that he had escaped. The harshness of this procedure was resisted from the very first by the northern people, but this law was on the statute books until the second and last law on the subject was passed as a part of the Compromise of 1850.

When the time came at which Congress could abolish the slave trade, a law was promptly passed, after considerable angry debate as to its terms, prohibiting the slave trade after December 31, 1807. In fact, it was necessary to even effect a compromise on this subject on the point as to what should be done with any slaves that might be imported contrary to the law; and it was decided that they should belong neither to the importer nor any purchaser, but should be subject to the regulations of the State in which they might be brought. As far as it restrained the South, the law abolishing the slave trade proved to be more of a dead letter than the Fugitive Slave Law did in the North, because the slave trade was carried on with more or less openness until the Civil War, it being estimated that about fifteen thou

sand slaves were brought into the country annually. The abolition of the slave trade caused several of the border States to devote their attention to slave breeding, which, with the increased demand and the large advance in prices, became a profitable industry in Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky.

The acquisition in 1803 of the Louisiana Territory, the wonderful and romantic exploration of it by Lewis and Clark in 1804-5, the closing of the Indian Wars and the second war with England, and hard times in the East, caused that tremendous rush of population to the West, which resulted in the admission of so many new States prior to 1820, and opened anew the slavery question. Vermont, admitted in 1791, Kentucky 1792, Tennessee 1796, Ohio 1803, Louisiana 1812, Indiana 1816, Mississippi 1817, Illinois 1818, and Alabama 1819, had raised the number of States to twenty-two; eleven free and eleven. slave; the early custom of admitting a free and slave State together having been strictly followed. The admission of these States effectively partitioned all of the territory east of the Mississippi between Freedom and Slavery, with the exception of the Michigan Territory (subsequently divided into Michigan and Wisconsin), and the new Territory of Florida, purchased from Spain in 1819. West of the Mississippi only one State had been admitted, and the rest of the land was known as the Missouri Territory. The tide of population passing down the Ohio, or through the States, had crossed the Mississippi into the Missouri country, and Missouri, in 1818, petitioned Congress for permission to

form a Constitution and enter the Union. Nothing was said about slavery, but it was known that the great majority of the Missouri settlers were slave owners or sympathizers, as those who held anti-slavery opinions were content to remain in the States formed out of the Northwest Territory, and it was therefore certain that Missouri would be a slave State.

The Bill authorizing Missouri to act was taken up in the House on February 13, 1819, and immediately Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, moved that the further introduction of slavery in Missouri be prohibited, and that children born in the State after its admission should be free at the age of twenty-five years. Instantly and unexpectedly an exciting, violent debate took place between the North and South. Neither professed to understand the position of the other, but the North was more sincerely astonished, because for the first time she realized what the South had intended for many years, that slavery should be made a permanent institution in the original States, and that it should be forced into the Missouri Territory as a matter of political necessity; because the extension of slave area had by this time become absolutely necessary for the interests of the South.

It was a plain proposition that if the South lost control of the legislative reins at Washington, slavery would eventually be doomed by adverse legislation and by the admission of free States. At the time the Missouri question came up, the North, by reason of her larger population, controlled the House, but the Senate was controlled by the