Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/393

 1783-1819] The slavery question. Missouri. 361 appropriated $500,000 for the construction of roads and bridges; and Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina appointed committees to prepare plans. The question of congressional aid to such undertakings became a national one; and from 1817 to 1832 no session of Congress was allowed to pass without the agitation of the question in some form or other. A fourth result of the " building of the West " was a struggle with slavery. While the colonies were under the British Crown, slavery and the slave-trade existed in each one of them. But in those where no great staple such as rice or tobacco was grown, where, for climatic and economic reasons, slavery was not a profitable form of labour, and where the demand for skilled and unskilled labourers was fully supplied by " redemptioners" and "bondservants," the moral aspects of slave-holding aroused strong feeling ; and repeated attempts were made to cut off the slave-trade and stop the source of supply. Every law enacted for the purpose, however, was disallowed by the King in Council; and slavery as an institution was forced on the colonies by the mother-country. The feeling against it, however, suffered no abatement; and, when the Revolution came and the colonies became independent States, the old attacks were vigorously renewed. Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut enacted gradual abolition laws. Vermont was never a slave-holding State. New Hampshire and Massachusetts became free soil by the interpretation of their constitutions ; and when, in 1787, the Continental Congress framed the Ordinance of Government for the territory of the United States north-west of the Ohio river, slavery was excluded, and a magnificent domain was added to the Free-Soil area. In time, New York and New Jersey adopted gradual abolition laws, and by so doing made the southern boundary of Pennsylvania (the Mason and Dixie line) and the Ohio river the dividing line between the Free and the Slave States. The Republic, in fine, was almost equally divided into slave-soil and free-soil ; and, as new States entered the Union, they were admitted alternately slave and free. By 1819, twenty-two were in the Union ; and of these, eleven were slave-holding and eleven free. As each had two members of the Senate, that body then consisted of forty- four members ; and the two great sections of the country were equally represented. In 1819, however, the legislature of Missouri besought Congress to cut off a piece of the Territory, authorise the people dwelling on it to form a State to be called Missouri, and admit it into the Union. The proposed State lay wholly west of the Mississippi river, and was part of the Louisiana Purchase, the soil of which had as yet been made neither slave nor free. Should the people of Missouri be left to do as they pleased, it was well known that they would form a Slave State. The Free-Soil members of Congress determined, therefore, that slavery should be prohibited in Missouri; members from the slave-holding States were equally determined that it should not be prohibited. The question CH. XI.