though they were, to a man, they saw no inconsistency in the promulgation of a constitution by a small group of framers. Congress admitted Indiana December 11, 1816.

Illinois was two years behind Indiana in time. Several years after admission the population was still under the required 60,000, but Congress that had fixed the figure could modify the test. There had been a legislature at Kaskaskia since 1812, and Ninian Edwards, the only territorial governor of Illinois, was a worthy peer of Harrison and St. Clair. He was born in Maryland, moved to Kentucky in the year of the Greenville Treaty, and was chief justice of Kentucky when named by President Madison as Governor of Illinois, at the age of thirty-four.

The Illinois Enabling Act passed Congress in April, 1818, as a routine procedure that had now become standardized. The most significant feature that it contained was again a boundary matter. Having given Indiana a little, Congress gave Illinois much. Instead of adhering to the Ordinance line, Illinois was offered the territory between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River for some sixty miles north of the southern end of the lake, to 42° 30′ north latitude. What was cut off from Illinois Territory, with the remainder from Indiana, was added to Michigan Territory, which was thus extended to the Mississippi River.

When the convention met at Kaskaskia on August 3, 1818, to frame the Illinois constitution, it is doubtful whether there were forty thousand people in the prospective State, and they were sparsely spread over an unwieldy area. The farmer members, however, acted as promptly as though they represented an important community and framed and promulgated a democratic constitution in twenty-three days. Not for fifteen years did another free State frame an initial constitution, and never again was a western free constitution placed in force by promulgation. The effects of population shift and its liberalizing tendencies were bringing about another view of the meaning of democratic control.

The question of slavery made an appearance in Illinois as it had done in both Indiana and Ohio, in varying degrees, in spite of the prohibition of the Ordinance of 1787. Down to the date of the admission of Illinois it was hardly more than an incidental issue; a mild vexation that a slave-holding citizen of Kentucky or Virginia could not take his slave property with him into the public territory of the United States without running the risk of

losing it. The Ordinance was explicit in its prohibition: "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." It was regarded as a permanent provision, based upon a compromise made in the old Congress, but like most matters of American law, its enforcement was difficult in a community that failed to approve it, and it never escaped some violations. Occasional slaves were taken into the Northwest Territory, and later into the Territories of Indiana and Illinois. There was little sentiment for the use of slaves and little profit to be derived from their exploitation. But many of the colonists, especially those from slave-holding regions, inclined to resent the provision that forbade their bringing in slaves if they so desired. Few of the earliest settlers were well enough off to have many slaves, but there were occasional domestic servants, as much friend as property, who were brought north of the Ohio and kept there in what the law would have regarded as slavery, had it been enforced.

There was more of this sentiment in Indiana than in Ohio, for here the southern immigrant strain was more nearly dominant than in Ohio. Harrison knew there were slaves held in Vincennes and Kaskaskia and thought the fault was in the law rather than in the slavery. A convention held at Vincennes early in his career as governor begged Congress to suspend the slavery prohibition because it was driving settlers to Missouri at the expense of Indiana. The southern influence and origin became more powerful as it pushed further west. Illinois was more interested in slaves than Indiana. The division of Indiana in 1809 therefore cut off so many slavery supporters that in what remained Indiana it was not hard to prevent any considerable spread of slavery feeling. The Indiana constitution declared "that all men are born equally free and independent," and forbade slavery, in the very language of the Ordinance. It however recognized the southern parentage of most of its population in requiring that apportionments should be based on free white citizens as Ohio had done in 1803 and in excluding negroes from the militia.

Progressively, as the frontier moved down the Ohio Valley, the southern heritage became more complete, and the disinclination to exclude slavery became stronger. There were few settlers who desired to go to Illinois on any terms before 1820; and fewer still had slaves or could use them there with profit.

But the common sentiment was such that the apportionment and the vote in the constitution of 1818 were limited to whites; and the whole of Article VI was devoted to something less than a whole-hearted program that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall hereafter be introduced." The existing slaves and indentured servants were recognized, subject to the law that the children of negroes and mulattoes, the women at eighteen and the men at twenty-one, should become free. The first legislature of the new State adopted a black code that came near to reëstablishing slavery for the free negroes, and for several years there was an imposing movement to amend the constitution so as to admit slavery without question. The southern end of Illinois, the area of first settlement, became "Egypt" during this political struggle. In 1824, however, after a violent political campaign, a proposed slavery amendment was beaten by a vote of five to four. The slavery question was settled for Illinois; but it had become a larger issue, dividing the whole United States into divergent social groups.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE COTTON KINGDOM: MISSISSIPPI AND ALABAMA

It is a matter of profound historical significance that the children of the South, educated in States in which slaves were chattels, could none the less free themselves from the institution of slavery during their first generation of residence north of the Ohio River. A heavy preponderance of the residents of the Old Northwest in 1820 came from Virginia or the country further south. Many to be sure had lived in the piedmont and mountain country where slaves were few, but the family names of tidewater, plantation Virginia were spread over the counties of the new States so freely as to prove the continuity of blood. Slavery was unpopular in the North, but more than that, it was unprofitable. An occasional domestic servant and a few field hands were found in the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, despite the Ordinance; but the movement to permit the general introduction of this type of labor was never able to command the support of more than a minority of the population. The Northwest was started free by the Ordinance of 1787; it remained free because of underlying economic conditions.

Slavery did not pay even in the southern States where it survived and flourished, but it was less unprofitable. If free labor had been available to do the work imposed upon the negroes, it would have been impossible for the system of slavery to stand up in competition with it. In only a few industries was the South able to work the slaves without absolute loss, and in these the method of work and the type of organization were dictated by the difficulties inherent in getting a safe profit out of ignorant and indifferent bondsmen. Never did southern capital produce as high a return as northern, never was it as abundant, never was its possessor as free to take advantage of opportunity. The southern planter owned his slaves, but in as true a sense they owned him and bound him to a narrow repetition of unprofitable operations. Except in the great fields devoted to cotton, tobacco, hemp, rice, and indigo, and in the domestic work around the planter's home, the South could not use slaves freely. In the typical process of clearing away the timber and making farms,

that gave to pioneering its essential character, they were almost useless.

After nearly two centuries of existence in the English colonies, slavery was at the time of the framing of the Federal Constitution "in the course of ultimate extinction." There was hardly a person of importance in the South, where the slaves were most numerous, who did not believe the system was bad as well as unprofitable. The effects upon the negro as well as upon his owner were demoralizing and did not tend to perpetuate the type of character that the American frontier bred. It was possible to insert in the Constitution of 1787 a provision allowing the ultimate prohibition of importation of slaves and abolition of the slave trade. And when the date for this came round in 1808, it was possible to act upon it. Leading southerners still believed in emancipation and belonged to anti-slavery societies; and in the North where there was no problem of what to do with the freed negroes, slavery was rapidly disappearing. There was nothing that the slave could do that the white farmer could not do better; and there was no crop so profitable that it paid to exploit it at the cost that negro labor entailed. The children of these southern States, who knew slavery as it was before 1808, were able to live without it after they had gone through the experiences of frontier planting in the Northwest.

Cotton proved to be the crop whose profits made negro labor yield a net return. The economic historians have shown that the fiber of the cotton boll was only an interesting curiosity until near the end of the eighteenth century. It was possible to raise it in a large part of the South, and in a few spots, soil and climate were right for the production of fine qualities with long silky threads. But it was impracticable to prepare it for the wheel and loom because of the seeds entangled in the fiber. The problem of lowering the cost of cleaning it intrigued the attention of many planters, without result, until in 1793 the Yankee tutor, Eli Whitney, turned to it while residing with a southern patron. The cotton gin that Whitney made was so simple that he could never control the profits arising from his patent; and so effective that it brought about an economic revolution in the South and improved the comfort of mankind for all time.

Once it became possible to produce cotton at reasonable cost, its high adaptability for textile manufactures gave it a market. The textiles of the eighteenth century, whether wool, linen, or