ry
alienation of New England, exasperated by the loss of her commerce and
suspicious of the Jeffersonian influence; a participation in the general
peace which followed 1815, and a revival of industry. Under this surface
tide of events went on a steady, quiet advance of the democratic
movement. With Jefferson's administration disappeared the Federal party
and the old distrust of the common people. State after State gave up the
property qualification--almost universal in the first period--and
adopted manhood suffrage. Slavery disappeared from the North; in New
Hampshire it was abolished by judicial decision, as in Massachusetts;
Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania passed gradual emancipation
laws, and a little later New York and New Jersey did the same. In
Kentucky, settled by hardy pioneers from Virginia, there had been a
vigorous campaign to establish a free State; the Baptist preachers,
strong leaders in morals and religion, had championed the cause of
freedom; the victory seemed decisively won, by three to one it was said,
in the election of May, 1798; but a torrent of excitement over the alien
and sedition laws submerged other issues, and the convention sanctioned
slavery as it existed. The African slave trade was made piracy by act of
Congress in 1808, though the extreme penalty was not inflicted for sixty
years, and a considerable traffic still went on. In furtherance of
emancipation, a colonization society was started in Pennsylvania, and in
a few years it had transported 20,000 freed negroes to Africa, and
established the feeble colony of Liberia. Meanwhile the first French
republic had freed half a million slaves in the West Indies; and Chili,
Buenos Ayres, Columbia, and Mexico, as they gained their independence
from Spain, had abolished slavery. The European reaction against the
French republic and empire had largely spent itself; the English
tradition of constitutional freedom had survived and promised to spread;
the Spanish colonies in America had won their independence.

The stiller and deeper current of industrial progress had moved on apace
in the United States. A new New England was being swiftly built in the
Northwest. The Southwest, too, was growing fast. The acquisition of the
Louisiana territory,--through an exigency of Napoleon's politics, and
the wise inconsistency of Jefferson--had opened another vast domain. At
the North, commerce, set free again, spread rapidly, and a new era of
manufactur