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 886 History of the Slavery question. [i783-i829 North-west Territory ; the first law for the rendition of fugitive slaves was enacted ; citizens of the United States were forbidden to engage in the slave-trade of foreign countries; subjects of foreign countries were forbidden to engage in the domestic slave-trade of the United States, or to use its ports to fit out slavers for trade with other countries; the authority of Congress to abolish, or in any manner meddle with, slavery in the Slave-holding States was denied; and after 1808 the importa- tion of slaves into the United States was prohibited by law. During the second period, which closed with the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, the Missouri Compromise was adopted, and the possessions of the United States west of the Missis- sippi were divided between slavery and freedom ; three Free and three Slave-holding States were admitted into the Union; the slave-trade was made piracy; the American Society for the Colonisation of Free Negroes in Africa was founded ; the colony of Liberia was planted on the west coast of Africa ; the attempt to change Illinois from a Free to a Slave-holding State was defeated ; a host of journals devoted to the treat- ment of the slave problem came into existence ; countless appeals, thoughts, pictures, brief views, remarks, sketches, letters, treatises, reports, bearing on some phase of slavery, were written and published; and numerous anti-slavery and colonisation societies were organised, chiefly in the Slave- holding States. Hostility to slavery, as .a moral and political wrong, spread widely and grew in intensity. The people of the cotton-belt, regarding slavery as a domestic State institution, denounced the work of anti-slavery enthusiasts as fanaticism. The people of New England, bound to the Cotton States by ties of business interest, and having settled the issue in their own section, were indifferent. But in the middle belt of States, from Pennsylvania to North Carolina and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, the friends of the black man were very active. Of 101 anti-slavery societies in existence in 1826, 95 were in this region. Of 98 societies auxiliary to the American Colonisation Society in 1828, 80 were in this same strip of country. Such was the condition of the slavery issue when, in 1829, a negro named David Walker wrote, printed, and scattered over the South a pamphlet entitled Walker's Appeal. It was addressed to the free blacks, who were urged to make the cause of the slave their own ; it censured the meekness and non-resistance of the blacks ; and, in a third edition published in 1830, it went so far as to touch on the superiority in numbers and bravery of the blacks over the whites, and to advise an insurrection when the time was ripe. The effect was immediate. Copies found in the hands of negroes in Richmond (Virginia), in New Orleans, in Savannah, in Tarborough (North Carolina), were seized and formally transmitted by the governors of Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, and North Carolina to their respective legislatures ; and sharp laws against the free blacks were enacted by Georgia and Louisiana.