be excluded from the same. According to this abstract of the
proceedings of Congress in the admission of new States into the Union,
of the eight new States within the original limits of the United States,
four have been admitted without an article excluding slavery; three have
been admitted on the condition that slavery should be excluded; and one
admitted without such condition. In the few first cases, Congress were
restrained from exercising the power to exclude slavery; in the next
three, they exercised this power; and in the last, it was unnecessary to
do so, slavery being excluded by the State Constitution.

The province of Louisiana, soon after its cession to the United States,
was divided into two territories, comprehending such parts thereof as
were contiguous to the river Mississippi, being the only parts of the
province that were inhabited. The foreign language, laws, customs,
and manners of the inhabitants, required the immediate and cautious
attention of Congress, which, instead of extending, in the first
instance, to these territories the ordinance of 1787, ordained special
regulations for the government of the same. These regulations were from
time to time revised and altered, as observation and experience showed
to be expedient, and as was deemed most likely to encourage and
promote those changes which would soonest qualify the inhabitants for
self-government and admission into the Union. When the United States
took possession of the province of Louisiana in 1804, it was estimated
to contain 50,000 white inhabitants, 40,000 slaves, and 2,000 free
persons of color.

More than four-fifths of the whites, and all the slaves, except about
thirteen hundred, inhabited New Orleans and the adjacent territory; the
residue, consisting of less than ten thousand whites, and about thirteen
hundred slaves, were dispersed throughout the country now included in
the Arkansas and Missouri territories. The greater part of the thirteen
hundred slaves were in the Missouri territory, some of them having been
removed thither from the old French settlements on the east side of
the Mississippi, after the passing of the ordinance of 1787, by which
slavery in those settlements was abolished.

In 1812, the territory of New Orleans, to which the ordinance of
1787, with the exception of certain parts thereof, had been previously
extended, was permitted by Congress to form a Constitution and State
Government, and admitted as a new Sta