which nearly wrecked our Republic, could get rid
of!

Out of that vast and fertile, but Slave-ridden old French Colony of
"Louisiana" were developed in due time the rich and flourishing Slave
States of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas.

It will have been observed that this acquisition of the Colony of
Louisiana and the contemporaneous inventions of the cotton-gin, improved
cotton-spinning machinery, and the application to it of steam power, had
already completely neutralized the wisdom of the Fathers in securing, as
they thought, the gradual but certain extinction of Slavery in the
United States, by that provision in the Constitution which enabled
Congress, after an interval of twenty years, to prohibit the African
Slave Trade; and which led the Congress, on March 22, 1794, to pass an
Act prohibiting it; to supplement it in 1800 with another Act in the
same direction; and on March 2, 1807, to pass another supplemental Act
--to take effect January 1, 1808--still more stringent, and covering any
such illicit traffic, whether to the United States or with other
countries. Never was the adage that, "The best laid schemes o' mice an'
men gang aft agley," more painfully apparent. Slaves increased and
multiplied within the land, and enriched their white owners to such a
degree that, as the years rolled by, instead of compunctions of
conscience on the subject of African Slavery in America, the Southern
leaders ultimately persuaded themselves to the belief that it was not
only moral, and sanctioned by Divine Law, but that to perpetuate it was
a philanthropic duty, beneficial to both races! In fact one of them
declared it to be "the highest type of civilization."

In 1812, the State of Louisiana, organized from the purchased Colony of
the same name, was admitted to the Union, and the balance of the
Louisiana purchase was thereafter known as the Territory of Missouri.

In 1818 commenced the heated and protracted struggle in Congress over
the admission of the State of Missouri--created from the Territory of
that name--as a Slave State, which finally culminated in 1820 in the
settlement known thereafter as the "Missouri Compromise."

Briefly stated, that struggle may be said to have consisted in the
efforts of the House on the one side, to restrict Slavery in the State
of Missouri, and the efforts of the Senate on the other, to give it free
rein. The House insisted on a clause in the Act of admission providing,
"That the int