Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/185

Rh of the tribes on the border territory of other tribes; second, encroachments of white settlers on the territory ceded to the tribes west of the Mississippi, especially in Arkansas Territory. The main difficulty was in the Gulf States and territory, especially in Georgia and Florida. There the humane efforts of young Houston, commended by Jackson as his military commander, were fresh in memory; but yet fresher was the subsequent military campaign of Jackson, when he not only drove the Seminoles from Georgia into Florida, then a Spanish possession, but pursued them even to the capture of St. Augustine, leaving thus a work of mingled efforts at forcible suppression and at treaty stipulation, for future administrations to complete. In this work the counsel of Houston became of special value.

The relation of the several States and of the people of the United States to the African race was the second question to be met. Their ready admission by the policy of the mother country into all the colonies except those of Pennsylvania and Georgia, the check put upon that introduction when, after the war of Independence, the New England States emancipated their slaves, and were filled with European laborers in their place, when Virginia ceded all her territory north of the Ohio and westward to the Mississippi to the Union, to be occupied only by free white settlers, and when the Federal Constitution forbid further importation after twenty-one years—this mixed and conflicting system of admission and exclusion had reached its crisis and apparent settlement in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. At the adoption of the Constitution there was a virtual balance of the slave-holding and non-slave-holding interests in the Senate which represented the States; since, while there were among the thirteen original States only six that were decidedly slave-holding States, two or three others had passed no formal acts of emancipation. The admission subsequently of new States, as of Vermont in 1791 and of Kentucky in 1792, of Tennessee in 1796 and of Ohio in 1802, of Louisiana in 1812 and of Indiana in 1816, of Mississippi in 1817 and of Illinois in 1818, of Alabama in 1819 and of Maine in 1820, seemed to indicate that these two interests were, in the conservative branch of the Government, to remain balanced. When, however, in 1817, Missouri applied for admission a new question arose. As a part of the French purchase of 1803, which included all the territory west of the Mississippi, from Louisiana northward, it seemed natural that African slavery, already introduced, should continue. On the other hand, the fact that it lay north of the mouth of the Ohio, fixed by Virginia as the limit of slave-holding States, and that it was bordering all along the Mississippi on Illinois, which was entitled to come